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In this talk, I will try to join two recent papers related to the phase
transition to Eternal Inflation.
In a first part, I will concentrate on slow-roll Inflation, and I will study the
phase transition to the eternal regime. I consider the volume of the universe at
reheating as order parameter, and I show that there exists a critical value for
the classical Inflaton speed, \dot\phi^2/H^4 = 3/(2 \pi^2), where the
probability distribution for the reheating volume undergoes a sharp transition.
In particular, for sub-critical Inflaton speeds, the system develops a
non-vanishing probability of having a strictly infinite reheating volume.
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss about a possibility of learning
something about Eternal Inflation at LHC. Even if nothing but a light Higgs is
observed at the LHC, suggesting that the Standard Model is unmodified up to
scales far above the weak scale, Higgs physics can yield surprises of
fundamental significance for Cosmology. As has long been known, the Standard
Model vacuum may be metastable for low enough Higgs mass, but a specific value
of the decay rate holds special significance: for a very narrow window of
parameters, our Universe has not yet decayed but the current inflationary
period can not be future eternal. Determining whether we are in this window
requires exquisite but achievable experimental precision. If the parameters are
observed to lie in this special range, particle physics will establish that the
future of our Universe is a global big crunch, without harboring pockets of
eternal inflation, strongly suggesting that eternal inflation is censored by
the fundamental theory.
Apr 4 2008, Pupin 904, Friday 2:00pm
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