Empirical constraints on vacuum decay in the stringy landscape

TL;DR

This paper challenges the assumption that our universe's vacuum must last longer than its current age, proposing that vacuum decay could be much faster and detectable through novel experiments involving gravitational effects on quantum probabilities.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that vacuum decay lifetime is not constrained by current cosmological observations and proposes an experimental method to measure it using quantum-gravitational effects.

Findings

Vacuum decay lifetime could be much shorter than the universe's age.

Parallel universes may allow us to survive vacuum decay.

A laboratory experiment could detect vacuum decay via violations of the Born rule.

Abstract

It is generally considered as self evident that the lifetime of our vacuum in the landscape of string theory cannot be much shorter than the current age of the universe. Here I show why this lower limit is invalid. A certain type of ``parallel universes'' is a necessary consequence of the string-landscape dynamics and might well allow us to ``survive'' vacuum decay. As a consequence our stringy vacuum's lifetime is empirically unconstrained and could be very short. Based on this counter-intuitive insight I propose a novel type of laboratory experiment that searches for an apparent violation of the quantum-mechanical Born rule by gravitational effects on vacuum decay. If the lifetime of our vacuum should turn out to be shorter than 6 x 10^{-13} seconds such an experiment is sufficiently sensitive to determine its value with state-of-the-art equipment.