The Late Time Behavior of False Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States

Abstract: We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false vacuum decay. It may increase the likelihood of eternal inflation, and may help explain the likelihood of observing a small vacuum energy at late times, as well as arguing against decay into a large negative energy (anti-de Sitter space), vacuum state as has been motivated by some string theory considerations. Several interesting open questions are raised, including whether observing the cosmological configuration of a metastable universe can constrain its inferred lifetime.