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Phys. Rev. D 78, 043501 (2008) [8 pages]

Volume-weighted measure for eternal inflation

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Sergei Winitzki
Department of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany and Yukawa Institute of Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Received 11 March 2008; revised 24 May 2008; published 1 August 2008

I propose a new volume-weighted probability measure for cosmological “multiverse” scenarios involving eternal inflation. The “reheating-volume (RV) cutoff” calculates the distribution of observable quantities on a portion of the reheating hypersurface that is conditioned to be finite. The RV measure is gauge-invariant, does not suffer from the “youngness paradox,” and is independent of initial conditions at the beginning of inflation. In slow-roll inflationary models with a scalar inflaton, the RV-regulated probability distributions can be obtained by solving nonlinear diffusion equations. I discuss possible applications of the new measure to “landscape” scenarios with bubble nucleation. As an illustration, I compute the predictions of the RV measure in a simple toy landscape.

© 2008 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.78.043501
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.78.043501
PACS:
98.80.Cq, 98.80.Jk, 98.80.Qc