Journal
JOURNAL OF COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS
Volume -, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2014/03/030
Keywords
inflation; initial conditions and eternal universe; cosmological perturbation theory
Funding
- New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology [37426]
- Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) Fund
- Foundational Questions Institute [FQXi-RFP3- 1015]
- National Science and Engineering Research Council through a Discovery grant
- STFC
- Leverhulme Trust
- European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013]
- NSERC
- CIFAR
- NSF [PHY-0969827, PHY-1308621]
- NASA [NNX13AH01G]
- STFC [ST/J001511/1, ST/I000879/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Physics [1308621] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Physics
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [0969827] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- NASA [NNX13AH01G, 474109] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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The theory of eternal inflation in an inflaton potential with multiple vacua predicts that our universe is one of many bubble universes nucleating and growing inside an ever-expanding false vacuum. The collision of our bubble with another could provide an important observational signature to test this scenario. We develop and implement an algorithm for accurately computing the cosmological observables arising from bubble collisions directly from the Lagrangian of a single scalar field. We first simulate the collision spacetime by solving Einstein's equations, starting from nucleation and ending at reheating. Taking advantage of the collision's hyperbolic symmetry, the simulations are performed with a 1+ 1-dimensional fully relativistic code that uses adaptive mesh refinement. We then calculate the comoving curvature perturbation in an open Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe, which is used to determine the temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background radiation. For a fiducial Lagrangian, the anisotropies are well described by a power law in the cosine of the angular distance from the center of the collision signature. For a given form of the Lagrangian, the resulting observational predictions are inherently statistical due to stochastic elements of the bubble nucleation process. Further uncertainties arise due to our imperfect knowledge about inflationary and pre-recombination physics. We characterize observational predictions by computing the probability distributions over four phenomeno-logical parameters which capture these intrinsic and model uncertainties. This represents the first fully-relativistic set of predictions from an ensemble of scalar field models giving rise to eternal inflation, yielding significant differences from previous non-relativistic approximations. Thus, our results provide a basis for a rigorous confrontation of these theories with cosmological data.
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