First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation

Creators: Feeney, Stephen M.; Johnson, Matthew C.; Mortlock, Daniel J.; Peiris, Hiranya V.

Abstract

The eternal inflation scenario predicts that our observable Universe resides inside a single bubble embedded in a vast inflating multiverse. We present the first observational tests of eternal inflation, performing a search for cosmological signatures of collisions with other bubble universes in cosmic microwave background data from the WMAP satellite. We conclude that the WMAP 7-year data do not warrant augmenting the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant with bubble collisions, constraining the average number of detectable bubble collisions on the full sky N̅ _s<1.6 at 68% C.L. Data from the Planck satellite can be used to more definitively test the bubble-collision hypothesis.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 27 December 2010; revised 12 May 2011; published 8 August 2011. We are grateful to the WMAP Science Team for supplying the end-to-end WMAP simulations. S. M. F. is supported by the Perren Fund. H.V. P. is supported by Marie Curie Grant No. MIRG-CT-2007-203314 from the European Commission and by STFC and the Leverhulme Trust. M. C. J. acknowledges support from the Moore foundation. M. C. J. and H.V. P. thank the Aspen Center for Physics, where this project was initiated. We acknowledge the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis (LAMBDA). Support for LAMBDA is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science.

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