The world next door - Results in landscape topography

TL;DR

This paper explores the landscape of string theory vacua, revealing that continuous series of connected minima are common, with implications for early universe physics and connections to unresolved mathematical problems.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the topography of string landscape moduli spaces, highlighting the prevalence of connected vacua series and linking them to mathematical group theory issues.

Findings

Connected series of vacua are common in the landscape.

Infinite series of minima relate to unresolved group theory problems.

Numerical studies of the mirror quintic illustrate these phenomena.

Abstract

Recently, it has become clear that neighboring multiple vacua might have interesting consequences for the physics of the early universe. In this paper we investigate the topography of the string landscape corresponding to complex structure moduli of flux compactified type IIB string theory. We find that series of continuously connected vacua are common. The properties of these series are described, and we relate the existence of infinite series of minima to certain unresolved mathematical problems in group theory. Numerical studies of the mirror quintic serve as illustrating examples.