The Top 10 500 Reasons Not To Believe in the String Landscape
Year: 2012
Type: preprint
Abstract: The String Landscape is a fantasy. We actually have a plausible landscape of minimally supersymmetric AdS4 solutions of supergravity modified by an exponential superpotential. None of these solutions is accessible to world sheet perturbation theory. If they exist as models of quantum gravity, they are defined by conformal field theories, and each is an independent quantum system, which makes no transitions to any of the others. This landscape has nothing to do with CDL tunneling or eternal inflation. A proper understanding of CDL transitions in QFT on a fixed background dS space, shows that the EI picture of this system is not justified within the approximation of low energy effective field theory. The cutoff independent physics, defined by the Euclidean functional integral over the 4-sphere admits only a finite number of instantons. Plausible extensions of these ideas to a quantum theory of gravity obeying the holographic principle explain all of the actual facts about CDL transitions in dS space, and lead to a picture radically different from eternal inflation. Theories of Eternal Inflation (EI) have to rely too heavily on the anthropic principle to be consistent with experiment. Given the vast array of effective low energy field theories that could be produced by the conventional picture of the string landscape one is forced to conclude that the most numerous anthropically allowed theories will disagree with experiment violently. Ideas about terminating EI by a Census Taker’s Hat, can resolve some of these issues because they claim that the late time dynamics of EI is determined by a single eigenvalue of a CDL generated Markov process. That eigenvalue in turn is dominated by a single, highly supersymmetric vacuum state, which is averred to be hostile to life of our type. Other components of the dominant eigenvector arise in low orders
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Tom Banks
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2978705313