Grainy multiverse

Abstract

I consider a landscape containing three vacua and study the topology of global spacelike slices in eternal inflation. A discrete toy model, which generalizes the well-studied Mandelbrot model, reveals a rich phase structure. Novel phases include monochromatic tubular phases, which contain crossing curves of only one vacuum, and a democratic tubular phase, which contains crossing curves of all three types of vacua. I discuss the generalization to realistic landscapes consisting of many vacua. Generically, the system ends up in a grainy phase, which contains no crossing curves or surfaces and consists of packed regions of different vacua. Other topological phases arise on the scale of several generations of nucleations.