Local observation in eternal inflation

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Apr 8;106(14):141302. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.141302. Epub 2011 Apr 8.

Abstract

We consider landscape models that admit several regions where the conditions for eternal inflation hold. It is shown that one can use the no-boundary wave function to calculate small departures from homogeneity within our past light cone despite the possibility of much larger fluctuations on super horizon scales. The dominant contribution comes from the history exiting eternal inflation at the lowest value of the potential. In a class of landscape models this predicts a tensor to scalar ratio of about 10%. In this way the no-boundary wave function defines a measure for the prediction of local cosmological observations.