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Published July 2011 | public
Journal Article

A status report on the observability of cosmic bubble collisions

Abstract

In the picture of eternal inflation as driven by a scalar potential with multiple minima, our observable universe resides inside one of many bubbles formed from transitions out of a false vacuum. These bubbles necessarily collide, upsetting the homogeneity and isotropy of our bubble interior, and possibly leading to detectable signatures in the observable portion of our bubble, potentially in the cosmic microwave background or other precision cosmological probes. This constitutes a direct experimental test of eternal inflation and the landscape of string theory vacua. Assessing this possibility roughly splits into answering three questions: What happens in a generic bubble collision? What observational effects might be expected? How likely are we to observe a collision? In this review we report the current progress on each of these questions, improve upon a few of the existing results and attempt to lay out directions for future work.

Additional Information

© 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd. Received 12 October 2009, in final form 8 February 2010; Published 17 June 2011. The authors wish to thank A Dahlen, R Easther, B Freivogel, J T Giblin, M Kleban, A Lewis, E Lim, J Niemeyer, H Peiris, K Sigurdson and P Steinhardt for helpful conversations. AA was supported by NSF grant PHY-0757912, and a 'Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology' grant from the Templeton Foundation. MJ's research is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and thanks the Aspen Center for Physics, UC Santa Cruz, the Perimeter Institute and the Abdus Salam ICTP for their hospitality while portions of this work were completed.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023