The Measure Problem in Cosmology

Physics – High Energy Physics – High Energy Physics - Theory

Scientific paper

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22 pages, 6 figures. Revised version with clarifying remarks on meaning of adopted measure, extra references and minor typogra

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevD.77.063516

The Hamiltonian structure of general relativity provides a natural canonical measure on the space of all classical universes, i.e., the multiverse. We review this construction and show how one can visualize the measure in terms of a "magnetic flux" of solutions through phase space. Previous studies identified a divergence in the measure, which we observe to be due to the dilatation invariance of flat FRW universes. We show that the divergence is removed if we identify universes which are so flat they cannot be observationally distinguished. The resulting measure is independent of time and of the choice of coordinates on the space of fields. We further show that, for some quantities of interest, the measure is very insensitive to the details of how the identification is made. One such quantity is the probability of inflation in simple scalar field models. We find that, according to our implementation of the canonical measure, the probability for N e-folds of inflation in single-field, slow-roll models is suppressed by of order exp(-3N) and we discuss the implications of this result.

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