Speaker
Dr
Cody Long
(Harvard University)
Description
The Ashok-Denef-Douglas method of counting flux vacua yields an enormous landscape of vacua, an overwhelming majority of which have a large number N of scalar fields. That same calculation suggests that the average density of vacua increases rapidly with N, leading to an increase in the bubble nucleation rates at large N, and therefore a decrease in the average lifetime of such vacua. I will discuss an investigation into how these effects influence cosmological vacuum selection in a standard bubble nucleation cosmology.
