Search Optimization, Funnel Topography, and Dynamical Criticality on the String Landscape

Understand

A striking feature of our universe is its near criticality.

• The cosmological constant and weak hierarchy problems, as well as the metastability of the electroweak vacuum, can all be understood as problems of criticality.
• This suggests a statistical physics approach, based on the string landscape.
• We present a dynamical selection mechanism for hospitable vacua based on search optimization.