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A stringy perspective on the coincidence problem

Cunillera, Francesc; Padilla, Antonio

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Authors

Francesc Cunillera



Abstract

We argue that, for string compactifications broadly consistent with swampland constraints, dark energy is likely to signal the beginning of the end of our universe as we know it, perhaps even through decompactification, with possible implications for the cosmological coincidence problem. Thanks to the scarcity (absence?) of stable de Sitter vacua, dark energy in string theory is assumed to take the form of a quintessence field in slow roll. As it rolls, a tower of heavy states will generically descend, triggering an apocalyptic phase transition in the low energy cosmological dynamics after at most a few hundred Hubble times. As a result, dark energy domination cannot continue indefinitely and there is at least a percentage chance that we find ourselves in the first Hubble epoch. We use a toy model of quintessence coupled to a tower of heavy states to explicitly demonstrate the breakdown in the cosmological dynamics as the tower becomes light. This occurs through a large number of corresponding particles being produced after a certain time, overwhelming quintessence. We also discuss some implications for early universe inflation.

Citation

Cunillera, F., & Padilla, A. (2021). A stringy perspective on the coincidence problem. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2021(10), Article 55. https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10%282021%29055

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 16, 2021
Online Publication Date Oct 6, 2021
Publication Date Oct 1, 2021
Deposit Date Sep 17, 2021
Publicly Available Date Sep 17, 2021
Journal Journal of High Energy Physics
Electronic ISSN 1029-8479
Publisher Springer Verlag
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 2021
Issue 10
Article Number 55
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10%282021%29055
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/6244121
Publisher URL https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP10(2021)055

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