Stochastic approach to de Sitter instability and eternal inflation

Abstract: We investigate when effective theories of a scalar field on (quasi-)de Sitter background break down through the stochastic formalism. We derive the Fokker-Planck equation leaving the second order time derivative of the scalar field. Assuming there exists an equilibrium distribution for the field velocity, we obtain a mean value and a variance of the field velocity caused by the quantum fluctuation. Introducing coarse-grained Einstein equations, we obtain bounds for the non-eternal inflation phase and for maintaining the exact de Sitter background. We point out that those bounds derived in our formalism correspond to the de Sitter entropy bound proposed by Arkani-Hamed, \textit{et.al.}, up to $O(1)$ factor, even for a massless free scalar field on exact de Sitter background. We discuss connections of our results to the quantum field theory also.