Eternal inflation, measures and the scale-factor time cutoff

by Dr Andrea De Simone (MIT)

Wednesday 22 Oct 2008, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

1/1-025 (CERN)

The present understanding of inflationary cosmology suggests that our universe is one among an infinite number of ``pockets'' in an eternally inflating multiverse. A realistic model of the multiverse has a physical volume that diverges with time. A method to regularize the infinities is required to extract physical predictions.I will review the mechanism of eternal inflation and some of the proposals to regularize the volume of the multiverse. The focus will then be on the ``scale-factor time cutoff measure'' and on its properties.