Litcius/Paper detail

Multiverse in an inverted island

Kevin Langhoff, Chitraang Murdia, Yasunori Nomura

2021Physical review. D/Physical review. D.23 citationsDOIOpen Access PDF

Abstract

We study the redundancies in the global spacetime description of the eternally inflating multiverse using the quantum extremal surface prescription. We argue that a sufficiently large spatial region in a bubble universe has an entanglement island surrounding it. Consequently, the semiclassical physics of the multiverse, which is all we need to make cosmological predictions, can be fully described by the fundamental degrees of freedom associated with certain finite spatial regions. The island arises due to mandatory collisions with collapsing bubbles, whose big crunch singularities indicate redundancies of the global spacetime description. The emergence of the island and the resulting reduction of independent degrees of freedom provides a regularization of infinities which caused the cosmological measure problem.

Topics & Concepts

PhysicsQuantum entanglementSpacetimeTheoretical physicsGravitational singularityBig BounceBig CrunchQuantum cosmologyClassical mechanicsDegrees of freedom (physics and chemistry)UniverseSemiclassical physicsMeasure (data warehouse)CosmologyWorld lineSingularityUniversal TimeQuantum field theory in curved spacetimeExtra dimensionsQuantum fluctuationEntropy (arrow of time)Inflation (cosmology)Quantum gravityQuantumCrunchUltimate fate of the universeRegularization (linguistics)De Sitter universeInitial singularityQuantum field theoryQuantum mechanicsCosmology and Gravitation TheoriesBlack Holes and Theoretical PhysicsNoncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories