Domain walls, near-BPS bubbles, and probabilities in the landscape

We develop a theory of static Bogomol’nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) domain walls in stringy landscape and present a large family of BPS walls interpolating between different supersymmetric vacua. Examples include Kachru, Kallosh, Linde, Trivedi models, STU models, type IIB multiple flux vacua, and models with several Minkowski and anti-de Sitter vacua. After the uplifting, some of the vacua become de Sitter (dS), whereas some others remain anti-de Sitter. The near-BPS walls separating these vacua may be seen as bubble walls in the theory of vacuum decay. As an outcome of our investigation of the BPS walls, we found that the decay rate of dS vacua to a collapsing space with a negative vacuum energy can be quite large. The parts of space that experience a decay to a collapsing space, or to a Minkowski vacuum, never return back to dS space. The channels of irreversible vacuum decay serve as sinks for the probability flow. The existence of such sinks is a distinguishing feature of the landscape. We show that it strongly affects the probability distributions in string cosmology.