Cosmological chirality and magnetic fields from parity violating particle decays
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72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Engineering topics
Vilenkin, Alexander
Publications and source records attributed to Vilenkin, Alexander.
Initial conditions for slow-roll inflation in a random Gaussian landscape
In the landscape perspective, our Universe begins with a quantum tunneling from an eternally-inflating parent vacuum, followed by a period of slow-roll inflation. We investigate the tunneling process and calculate the probability distribution for the initial conditions and for the number of e-folds of slow-roll inflation, modeling the landscape by a small-field one-dimensional random Gaussian potential. We find that such a landscape is fully consistent with observations, but the probability for future detection of spatial curvature is rather low, P ∼ 10{sup −3}.
79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
Inflation in random Gaussian landscapes
We develop analytic and numerical techniques for studying the statistics of slow-roll inflation in random Gaussian landscapes. As an illustration of these techniques, we analyze small-field inflation in a one-dimensional landscape. We calculate the probability distributions for the maximal number of e-folds and for the spectral index of density fluctuations n {sub s} and its running α {sub s} . These distributions have a universal form, insensitive to the correlation function of the Gaussian ensemble. We outline possible extensions of our methods to a large number of fields and to models of large-field inflation. These methods do not suffer from potential inconsistencies inherent in the Brownian motion technique, which has been used in most of the earlier treatments.
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Primordial black hole and wormhole formation by domain walls
In theories with a broken discrete symmetry, Hubble sized spherical domain walls may spontaneously nucleate during inflation. These objects are subsequently stretched by the inflationary expansion, resulting in a broad distribution of sizes. The fate of the walls after inflation depends on their radius. Walls smaller than a critical radius fall within the cosmological horizon early on and collapse due to their own tension, forming ordinary black holes. But if a wall is large enough, its repulsive gravitational field becomes dominant much before the wall can fall within the cosmological horizon. In this ''supercritical'' case, a wormhole throat develops, connecting the ambient exterior FRW universe with an interior baby universe, where the exponential growth of the wall radius takes place. The wormhole pinches off in a time-scale comparable to its light-crossing time, and black holes are formed at its two mouths. As discussed in previous work, the resulting black hole population has a wide distribution of masses and can have significant astrophysical effects. The mechanism of black hole formation has been previously studied for a dust-dominated universe. Here we investigate the case of a radiation-dominated universe, which is more relevant cosmologically, by using numerical simulations in order to find the initial mass of a black hole as a function of the wall size at the end of inflation. For large supercritical domain walls, this mass nearly saturates the upper bound according to which the black hole cannot be larger than the cosmological horizon. We also find that the subsequent accretion of radiation satisfies a scaling relation, resulting in a mass increase by about a factor of 2.
79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
Fireballs from superconducting cosmic strings
Thermalized fireballs should be created by cusp events on superconducting cosmic strings. This simple notion allows to reliably estimate particle emission from the cusps in a given background magnetic field. With plausible assumptions about intergalactic magnetic fields, the cusp events can produce observable fluxes of high-energy photons and neutrinos with unique signatures.
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Vacuum statistics and stability in axionic landscapes
We investigate vacuum statistics and stability in random axionic landscapes. For this purpose we developed an algorithm for a quick evaluation of the tunneling action, which in most cases is accurate within 10%. We find that stability of a vacuum is strongly correlated with its energy density, with lifetime rapidly growing as the energy density is decreased. On the other hand, the probability P(B) for a vacuum to have a tunneling action B greater than a given value declines as a slow power law in B. This is in sharp contrast with the studies of random quartic potentials, which found a fast exponential decline of P(B). Our results suggest that the total number of relatively stable vacua (say, with B>100) grows exponentially with the number of fields N and can get extremely large for N∼> 100. The problem with this kind of model is that the stable vacua are concentrated near the absolute minimum of the potential, so the observed value of the cosmological constant cannot be explained without fine-tuning. To address this difficulty, we consider a modification of the model, where the axions acquire a quadratic mass term, due to their mixing with 4-form fields. This results in a larger landscape with a much broader distribution of vacuum energies. The number of relatively stable vacua in such models can still be extremely large.
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Black holes and the multiverse
Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. After inflation ends, the bubbles quickly dissipate their kinetic energy; they come to rest with respect to the Hubble flow and eventually form black holes. The fate of the bubble itself depends on the resulting black hole mass. If the mass is smaller than a certain critical value, the bubble collapses to a singularity. Otherwise, the bubble interior inflates, forming a baby universe, which is connected to the exterior FRW region by a wormhole. A similar black hole formation mechanism operates for spherical domain walls nucleating during inflation. As an illustrative example, we studied the black hole mass spectrum in the domain wall scenario, assuming that domain walls interact with matter only gravitationally. Our results indicate that, depending on the model parameters, black holes produced in this scenario can have significant astrophysical effects and can even serve as dark matter or as seeds for supermassive black holes. The mechanism of black hole formation described in this paper is very generic and has important implications for the global structure of the universe. Baby universes inside super-critical black holes inflate eternally and nucleate bubbles of all vacua allowed by the underlying particle physics. The resulting multiverse has a very non-trivial spacetime structure, with a multitude of eternally inflating regions connected by wormholes. If a black hole population with the predicted mass spectrum is discovered, it could be regarded as evidence for inflation and for the existence of a multiverse.
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Stabilizing oscillating universes against quantum decay
We investigate the effect of vacuum corrections, due to the trace anomaly and Casimir effect, on the stability of an oscillating universe with respect to decay by tunneling to the singularity. We find that these corrections do not generally stabilize an oscillating universe. However, stability may be achieved for some specially fine-tuned non-vacuum states.
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
Topological defects from the multiverse
Many theories of the early universe predict the existence of a multiverse where bubbles continuously nucleate giving rise to observers in their interior. In this paper, we point out that topological defects of several dimensionalities will also be produced in de Sitter like regions of the multiverse. In particular, defects could be spontaneously nucleated in our parent vacuum. We study the evolution of these defects as they collide with and propagate inside of our bubble. We estimate the present distribution of defects in the observable part of the universe. The expected number of such nearby defects turns out to be quite small, even for the highest nucleation rate. We also study collisions of strings and domain walls with our bubble in our past light cone. We obtain simulated full-sky maps of the loci of such collisions, and find their angular size distribution. Similarly to what happens in the case of bubble collisions, the prospect of detecting any collisions of our bubble with ambient defects is greatly enhanced in the case where the cosmological constant of our parent vacuum is much higher than the vacuum energy density during inflation in our bubble.
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Past incompleteness of a bouncing multiverse
According to classical GR, Anti-de Sitter (AdS) bubbles in the multiverse terminate in big crunch singularities. It has been conjectured, however, that the fundamental theory may resolve these singularities and replace them by nonsingular bounces. This may have important implications for the beginning of the multiverse. Geodesics in cosmological spacetimes are known to be past-incomplete, as long as the average expansion rate along the geodesic is positive, but it is not clear that the latter condition is satisfied if the geodesic repeatedly passes through crunching AdS bubbles. We investigate this issue in a simple multiverse model, where the spacetime consists of a patchwork of FRW regions. The conclusion is that the spacetime is still past-incomplete, even in the presence of AdS bounces.
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
A quantum measure of the multiverse
It has been recently suggested that probabilities of different events in the multiverse are given by the frequencies at which these events are encountered along the worldline of a geodesic observer (the ''watcher''). Here I discuss an extension of this probability measure to quantum theory. The proposed extension is gauge-invariant, as is the classical version of this measure. Observations of the watcher are described by a reduced density matrix, and the frequencies of events can be found using the decoherent histories formalism of Quantum Mechanics (adapted to open systems). The quantum watcher measure makes predictions in agreement with the standard Born rule of QM.
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Instability of an emergent universe
Oscillating solutions to the effective equations of Loop Quantum Cosmology have been suggested for the role of an 'eternal seed', providing a possible starting point for the emergent universe scenario. We investigate the stability of a particular model, sourced by a homogeneous massless scalar field and a negative cosmological constant, with respect to small perturbations and to quantum collapse. We find that the model has perturbatively stable and unstable solutions, with both types of solutions occupying significant regions of the parameter space. All solutions are unstable with respect to collapse by quantum tunneling to zero size. We discuss the possibility that the state resulting from the collapse is non-singular, so it may tunnel back to the oscillating regime. We argue that the universe is then likely to evolve to states of very large size with large particle occupation numbers.
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Schwinger effect in de Sitter space
We consider Schwinger pair production in 1+1 dimensional de Sitter space, filled with a constant electric field E. This can be thought of as a model for describing false vacuum decay beyond the semiclassical approximation, where pairs of a quantum field φ of mass m and charge e play the role of vacuum bubbles. We find that the adiabatic ''in'' vacuum associated with the flat chart develops a space-like expectation value for the current J, which manifestly breaks the de Sitter invariance of the background fields. We derive a simple expression for J(E), showing that both ''upward'' and ''downward'' tunneling contribute to the build-up of the current. For heavy fields, with m{sup 2} >> eE,H{sup 2}, the current is exponentially suppressed, in agreement with the results of semiclassical instanton methods. Here, H is the inverse de Sitter radius. On the other hand, light fields with m || H lead to a phenomenon of infrared hyperconductivity, where a very small electric field mH∼<eE || H{sup 2} leads to a very large current J ∼ H{sup 3}/E. We also show that all Hadamard states for φ necessarily break de Sitter invariance. Finally, we comment on the role of initial conditions, and ''persistence of memory'' effects.
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗