Random Polynomials and the Friendly Landscape

Abstract

In hep-th/0501082, a field theoretic ``toy model'' for the Landscape was proposed. We show that the considerations of that paper carry through to realistic effective Lagrangians, such as those that emerge out of string theory. Extracting the physics of the large number of metastable vacua that ensue requires somewhat more sophisticated algebro-geometric techniques, which we review.