Eternal Inflation with Arrival Terminals

TL;DR

This paper investigates how including arrival terminals in the string theory landscape affects cosmological models, challenging previous assumptions and highlighting the importance of initial conditions and tuning.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of arrival terminals into the analysis of the string landscape, showing their significant impact on cosmological conclusions.

Findings

Results are highly sensitive to the presence of arrival terminals.

Relaxing assumptions about terminal vacua alters previous cosmological predictions.

Highlights the importance of initial conditions and tuning in cosmology.

Abstract

We analyze the cosmological role of terminal vacua in the string theory landscape, and point out that existing work on this topic makes very strong assumptions about the properties of the terminal vacua. We explore the implications of relaxing these assumptions (by including "arrival" as well as "departure" terminals) and demonstrate that the results in earlier work are highly sensitive to their assumption of no arrival terminals. We use our discussion to make some general points about tuning and initial conditions in cosmology.