Eternal Inflation with Arrival Terminals

Abstract

We analyze the cosmological role of terminal vacua in the string theory landscape, and point out that existing work on this topic makes very strong assumptions about the properties of the terminal vacua. We explore the implications of relaxing these assumptions (by including "arrival" as well as "departure" terminals) and demonstrate that the results in earlier work are highly sensitive to their assumption of no arrival terminals. We use our discussion to make some general points about tuning and initial conditions in cosmology.

6 pages, 4 figures. V2: Final version accepted for publication in PRD. Presentation has been clarified in sections I and IV. No changes to our technical points and conclusions