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Cosmological Implications of the String Theory Landscape

Laura Mersini-Houghton
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Abstract

Progress in string theory has resulted in a whole landscape of vacua solutions.In this talk I describe a proposal for exploring the cosmological implications of the landscape, based on the dynamics of the wavefunction of the universe propagating on it. The landscape is taken as the phase space of the initial conditions since every of its vacua can potentially give rise to a universe. A superselection rule on the landscape phase space emerges when we include the backreaction of massive long wavelengths and the quantum dynamics of gravitational and matter degrees of freedom. The quantum dynamics of the system selects only high energy patches which survive the collapse induced by the gravitational instability of massive perturbations.

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Laura Mersini-Houghton. 2006-09-16. Cosmological Implications of the String Theory Landscape. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2409103

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