arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Alek Bedroya.
We demonstrate the validity of the String Lamppost Principle-that all consistent theories of quantum gravity are in the String Landscape-for supersymmetric theories in $d>6$ using compactness and connectedness of the moduli space of small instantons, as well as the classification of the associated Coulomb branch.
A number of Swampland conjectures and in particular the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) suggest that de Sitter space is highly unstable if it exists at all. In this paper we construct effective theories of scalars rolling on potentials which are dual to a chain of short-lived dS spaces decaying from one to the next through a cascade of non-perturbative nucleation of bubbles. We find constraints on the effective potential resulting from various swampland criteria, including TCC, Weak Gravity Conjecture and Distance Conjecture. Surprisingly we find that TCC essentially incorporates all the other ones, and leads to a subclass of possible dual effective potentials. These results marginally rule out emergence of eternal inflation in the dual effective theory. We discuss some cosmological implications of our observations.
Motivated by the coincidence of scrambling time in de Sitter and maximum lifetime given by the $\textit{Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture}$ (TCC), we study the relation between the de Sitter complementarity and the Swampland conditions. We study thermalization in de Sitter space from different perspectives and show that TCC implies de Sitter space cannot live long enough to be considered a thermal background. We also revisit $α$-vacua in light of this work and show that TCC imposes multiple initial condition/fine-tuning problems on any conventional inflationary scenario.
We study the implications of the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) for early universe cosmology and in particular inflationary cosmology. The TCC leads to the conclusion that if we want inflationary cosmology to provide a successful scenario for cosmological structure formation, the energy scale of inflation has to be lower than $10^9$ GeV. Demanding the correct amplitude of the cosmological perturbations then forces the generalized slow-roll parameter $ε$ of the model to be very small ($<10^{-31}$). This leads to the prediction of a negligible amplitude of primordial gravitational waves. For slow-roll inflation models, it also leads to severe fine tuning of initial conditions.
We consider the corrections due to quantum fluctuations of fields on charged black holes induced from the energy-momentum trace anomaly. Although the number of horizons stays unchanged and their positions receive only finite corrections, the geometry, thermodynamics and formation of RN black holes change seriously in particular for small ones. The entropy receives a logarithmic correction. The line $Q=M$, separating naked singularities from physical solutions is corrected, putting a lower limit on the mass and an upper limit on the temperature of the black hole as a function of its charge. The modifications are highly significant in the cases of near-extremal and small black holes. We also show that for black holes with small mass can stay in thermal equilibrium without any constraint on the volume of the container. This result is in contrast to the large black holes that need a finite volume container for thermal equilibrium. The minimum of the mass lower limits occurs at zero charge, resulting in the extremal Schwarzschild black hole with a specific mass of the order of $M_{p}$ and zero temperature. This state which has only gravitational interaction will be the final stage of Hawking radiation. Stability and lack of any interaction but gravitational, makes the extremal Schwarzschild black hole a serious candidate for dark matter particle.
Thermodynamic parameters such as temperature and pressure can be defined from the statistical behavior of a system. Therefore, thermal fluctuation is an inseparable characteristic of these parameters which eventually finds its way into experimental data. Analyzing these fluctuations is very useful in studying the phase transitions of a physical system or its behavior around critical points. However, this approach is not straightforward as most of the times it is impossible to distinguish meaningful thermal fluctuations from those due to the instrumental errors. In this article, we have offered a method by which an experimenter can separate this multi-sourced fluctuation into its constitutive parts according to their sources. Although the article is only focused on a specific system, which is a high pressure charged gas, we have used a computational method which could be used for various other systems. Our proposed idea is very efficient and reduces the required computation time by a remarkable fraction. We have used Euler algorithm, which generally does not hold the internal energy conserved; But we have used this fact as a tool which allows us to surf in the phase space of the system and reach different energy levels in significantly less time. Although system does not spend enough time in a single energy level to equilibrate, but we have been able to extract the details of the equilibrium state out of our data. Using numerical computations combined with theoretical modelings we have given a final expression for the amount of the overall fluctuations existing in the measured pressure values. This expression is given in terms of the characteristics of both the gas and the barometer so that it can be experimentally verified.