English

Recovering the Negative Mode for Type B Coleman-de Luccia Instantons

High Energy Physics - Theory 2013-04-17 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

The usual (type A) thin-wall Coleman-de Luccia instanton is made by a bigger-than-half sphere of the false vacuum and a smaller-than-half sphere of the true vacuum. It has a the standard O(4) symmetric negative mode associated with changing the size of false vacuum region. On the other hand, the type B instanton, made by two smaller-than-half spheres, was believed to have lost this negative mode. We argue that such belief is misguided due to an over-restriction on Euclidean path integral. We introduce the idea of a "purely geometric junction" to visualize why such restriction could be removed, and then explicitly construct this negative mode. We also show that type B and type A instantons have the same thermal interpretation for mediating tunnelings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1210.4740,
  title  = {Recovering the Negative Mode for Type B Coleman-de Luccia Instantons},
  author = {I-Sheng Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.4740},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

version 3, 18 pages, 6 figures, changed the title to follow the terminology of earlier works and expanded appendix to address the comments from Brown, Freivogel, Weinberg and Xiao