Eternal Inflation in Swampy Landscapes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the implications of swampland conjectures on eternal inflation within string theory landscapes, considering scenarios with and without de Sitter vacua, and finds that inflation remains eternal in both cases, leading to a complex multiverse structure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of eternal inflation in swampland-inspired landscapes, including cases where de Sitter vacua are absent or rare, and describes the resulting multiverse structure.

Findings

Inflation is eternal in both dS and non-dS landscape scenarios.

Multiverse structure differs significantly from standard models.

Both scenarios support the representation of all inflation-capable regions in the multiverse.

Abstract

The much-discussed swampland conjectures suggest significant constraints on the properties of string theory landscape and on the nature of the multiverse that this landscape can support. The conjectures are especially constraining for models of inflation; in particular, they exclude the existence of de Sitter (dS) vacua. If the conjectures are false and dS vacua do exist, it still appears that their construction in string theory requires a fair amount of fine-tuning, so they may be vastly outnumbered by AdS vacua. Here we explore the multiverse structure suggested by these considerations. We consider two scenarios: (i) a landscape where dS vacua are rare and (ii) a landscape where dS vacua do not exist and the dS potential maxima and saddle points are not flat enough to allow for the usual hilltop inflation, even though slow-roll inflation is possible on the slopes of the potential. We argue that in both scenarios inflation is eternal and all parts of the landscape that can support inflation get represented in the multiverse. The spacetime structure of the multiverse in such models is nontrivial and is rather different from the standard picture.