Quantifying the potential and flux landscapes for nonequilibrium multiverse, a new scenario for time arrow

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel nonequilibrium multiverse model with potential and flux landscapes, explaining the arrow of time and universe probabilities through flux dynamics and thermodynamic costs.

Contribution

It quantifies potential and flux landscapes for a multiverse, linking flux dynamics to irreversibility and proposing a new perspective on universe probabilities beyond anthropic reasoning.

Findings

Flux landscape quantifies universe weights.

Breaking detailed balance relates to flux and irreversibility.

Terminal vacua can form dominant cycles, affecting universe likelihoods.

Abstract

We propose a new scenario of nonequilibirum multiverse. We quantified the potential landscape and the flux landscape for the Bousso-Polchinski type of multiverse. The potential landscape quantifies the weight of each universe. When the terminal vacuum with zero (flat) or negative cosmological constant (AdS) have a chance to tunnel back to the normal universes with positive cosmological constant (dS) through the bounce suggested by the recent studies, the detailed balance of the populations of the multiverse can be broken. We found that the degree of the detailed balance breaking can be quantified by the underlying average flux and associated flux landscape, which gives arise to the dynamical origin of irreversibility and the arrow of time. We also showed that the steady state of the multiverse is maintained by the thermodynamic cost quantified by the entropy production rate which is associated to the flux. This gives arise to thermodynamic origin of time irreversibility. We show that terminal vacuum universes can have dominant weights or lowest potentials giving arise to a funnel shaped potential landscape, while terminal vacuum universes together with other normal universes including ours can form dominant cycles giving arise to a funnel shaped cycle flux landscape. This indicates that even our universe may not be distinct from others based on the probability measure, it may lie in the dominant cycle(s), leading to higher chance of being found. This may provide an additional way beyond the anthropological principle for identifying our universe.