English

Coleman-de Luccia Tunneling Wave Function

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2019-07-30 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We revisit the famous Coleman-de Luccia formalism for decay of false vacuum in gravitational theory. Since the corresponding wave function is time-independent we argue that its instanton's interpretation as the decay rate probability is problematic. We instead propose that such phenomenon can better be described by the Wheeler-de Witt's wave function. To do so, the Hamilton-Jacobi formalism is employed in the WKB approximation. The scalar and gravitational fields can then be treated as a two-dimensional effective metric. For a particular case of dS-to-dS tunneling, we calculated the wave function and found that it depends only on the potential of the false, and not on the true, vacuum; reminiscent of, though in totally different formalism with, the Hawking-Moss result. In general, this alternative approach might have significant impact on the study of very early universe and quantum cosmology.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.10110,
  title  = {Coleman-de Luccia Tunneling Wave Function},
  author = {J. Kristiano and R. D. Lambaga and H. S. Ramadhan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.10110},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:48:43.987Z