Eternal inflation, bubble collisions, and the persistence of memory

A "bubble universe" nucleating in an eternally inflating false vacuum will experience, in the course of its expansion, collisions with an infinite number of other bubbles. In an idealized model, we calculate the rate of collisions around an observer inside a given reference bubble. We show...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. D, Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology, 2007-12, Vol.76 (12), Article 123512
Main Authors: Garriga, Jaume, Guth, Alan H., Vilenkin, Alexander
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Collisions (Physics)
Col·lisions (Física)
Física de partícules
Particle physics
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Summary:A "bubble universe" nucleating in an eternally inflating false vacuum will experience, in the course of its expansion, collisions with an infinite number of other bubbles. In an idealized model, we calculate the rate of collisions around an observer inside a given reference bubble. We show that the collision rate violates both the homogeneity and the isotropy of the bubble universe. Each bubble has a center which can be related to "the beginning of inflation" in the parent false vacuum, and any observer not at the center will see an anisotropic bubble collision rate that peaks in the outward direction. Surprisingly, this memory of the onset of inflation persists no matter how much time elapses before the nucleation of the reference bubble.
ISSN:1550-7998
1550-2368
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.76.123512