Related papers: Tunneling with negative tension
We give an extensive study of the tunnelling between arbitrary (anti-)de Sitter spacetimes separated by an infinitesimally thin relativistic shell in arbitrary spacetime dimensions. In particular, we find analytically an exact expression…
We study the contribution to the decay of de Sitter vacua from bounces with O(3) x O(2) symmetry. These correspond to the thermal production of a vacuum bubble at the center of a horizon volume with radius r_H and a temperature defined by…
We compute, from first principles, the quantum fluctuations about instanton saddle points of the Euclidean path integral for Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field. The Euclidean two-point correlator is analytically continued into the…
In this work, we study field theoretic systems of a single axion-like field with linear potentials modulated by cosine terms, allegedly induced by non-perturbative instanton configurations. These systems are considered in expanding-Universe…
This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We introduce a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum…
We propose two new classes of instantons which describe the tunneling and/or quantum creation of closed and open universes. The instantons leading to an open universe can be considered as generalizations of the Coleman-De-Luccia solution.…
In the present work, we quantize a closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model in the presence of a positive cosmological constant and radiation. It gives rise to a Wheeler-DeWitt equation for the scale factor which has the form of a…
We allow a scalar field on a flat FLRW background metric to tunnel between two degenerate vacua. The resulting true vacuum state then violates the Null Energy Condition, and the corresponding homogeneous fluid induces a bounce, after which…
There exist two interpretations of instantons in the literature. The first interpretation regards instanton as divider between the initial and final hypersurfaces. The Coleman-De Luccia instanton is one such an example. The second…
The tunneling wave function of the universe is calculated exactly for a de Sitter minisuperspace model with a massless conformally coupled scalar field, both by solving the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and by evaluating the Lorentzian path…
Hawking and the author have proposed a class of singular, finite action instantons for defining the initial conditions for inflation. Vilenkin has argued they are unacceptable. He exhibited an analogous class of asymptotically flat…
We investigate false vacuum decay catalysed by black holes under the influence of the higher order Gauss-Bonnet term. We study both bubble nucleation and Hawking-Moss types of phase transition in arbitrary dimension. The equations of motion…
We explore the stability of domain wall and bubble solutions in theories with compact extra dimensions. The energy density stored inside of the wall can destabilize the volume modulus of a compactification, leading to solutions containing…
Recent developments in unifying treatment of domain wall configurations and their global space-time structure is presented. Domain walls between vacua of non-equal cosmological constant fall in three classes depending on the value of their…
Monte Carlo studies of $CP^{N-1}$ sigma models have shown that the structure of topological charge in these models undergoes a sharp transition at $N=N_c\approx 4$. For $N<N_c$ topological charge is dominated by small instantons, while for…
Processes leading to anomalous fluctuations in turbulent flows, referred to as intermittency, are still challenging. We consider cascade trajectories through scales as realizations of a stochastic Langevin process for which multiplicative…
An Euclidean bounce describing vacuum decay can be considered as an infinite stack of concentric thin shells to which a thin-wall action can be assigned. The integral over all shells produces then a tunneling action that is precisely the…
We construct a simple AdS_4 x S^1 flux compactification stabilized by a complex scalar field winding the extra dimension and demonstrate an instability via nucleation of a bubble of nothing. This occurs when the Kaluza -- Klein dimension…
The conventional approach describes the spherical domain walls by the same state equation as the flat ones. In such case they also must be gravitationally repulsive, what is seemingly in contradiction with Birkhoff's theorem. However this…
Starting from trace formulae for the tunnelling splittings (or decay rates) analytically continued in the complex time domain, we obtain explicit semiclassical expansions in terms of complex trajectories that are selected with appropriate…