Amol Upadhye (Princeton University)
The string landscape and the cosmological constant


Bousso and Polchinski constructed a simplified model of the string landscape, in which different regions of the universe have different vacuum energies, and new vacua are created through bubble nucleation. The probability of our observing a given vacuum energy is the product of the anthropic selection function and the probability P(Λ) of creating a bubble of such a vacuum. I will study this probability distribution P(Λ) in the Bousso-Polchinski model, which is determined by the dynamics of tunneling among the multiple vacua. Since the actual string landscape is expected to be much less ordered than the Bousso-Polchinski landscape, I will explore generalizations of the model, including random perturbations of the vacuum energies. Finally, the reheating of the universe in landscape models will be discussed.



30 11 2006, ISCAP Seminar Room Pupin 908, 12:00 noon