Observing the dimensionality of our parent vacuum
Name
Graham-2010-Observing the dimens.pdf
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270.98 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Graham, Peter W.
Harnik, Roni
Rajendran, Surjeet
Date Issued
September 2010
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Graham, Peter W., Roni Harnik, and Surgeet Fajendran. "Observing the dimensionality of our parent vacuum." Physical Review D 82.6 (201): 063524. © 2010 The American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
It seems generic to have vacua with lower dimensionality than ours. We consider the possibility that the observable universe originated in a transition from one of these vacua. Such a universe has anisotropic spatial curvature. This may be directly observable through its late-time effects on the CMB if the last period of slow-roll inflation was not too long. These affect the entire sky, leading to correlations which persist up to the highest CMB multipoles, thus allowing a conclusive detection above cosmic variance. Further, this anisotropic curvature causes different dimensions to expand at different rates. This leads to other potentially observable signals including a quadrupolar anisotropy in the CMB which limits the size of the curvature. Conversely, if isotropic curvature is observed it may be evidence that our parent vacuum was at least 3+1 dimensional. Such signals could reveal our history of decompactification, providing evidence for the existence of vastly different vacua.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.063524
