Related papers: Escaping the crunch: gravitational effects in clas…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
We use analytic estimates and numerical simulations to explore the stochastic approach to vacuum decay. According to this approach, the time derivative of a scalar field, which is in a local vacuum state, develops a large fluctuation and…
In this note, we point out that in the eternal inflation driven by the metastable vacua of the landscape, it might be possible that some large and local quantum fluctuations with the null energy condition violation can stride over the…
According to the inflationary scenario, all structure in the Universe can be traced back to quantum fluctuations of the metric and scalar field(s) during inflation. The seeds of this structure can be observed as classical anisotropies in…
The warm inflation scenario is an alternative mechanism which can explain the isotropic and homogeneous Universe which we are living in. In this work I extend a previously introduced formalism, without the restriction of slow - roll regime.…
We argue that the conjectured dark mater in the Universe may be endowed with a new kind of gravitational charge that couples to a short range gravitational interaction mediated by a massive vector field. A model is constructed that…
We argue that the preferred classical variables that emerge from a pure quantum state are determined by its entanglement structure in the form of redundant records: information shared between many subsystems. Focusing on the early universe,…
The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…
We study whether a first-order phase transition at the end of inflation can generate the observed dark matter abundance through bubble collisions. The transition occurs in a spectator scalar sector with an inflaton-dependent effective…
Motivated by cosmological first-order phase transitions we examine the nucleation and evolution of vacuum bubbles in non-vacuum environments. Non-standard backgrounds can be relevant in the context of rapid tunneling processes on the…
We show that in imaginary time quantum metric fluctuations of empty space form a self-consistent de Sitter gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling from "nothing" into de Sitter space of real time (no…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…
We propose a new measure for eternal inflation, based on search optimization and first-passage statistics. This work builds on the dynamical selection mechanism for vacua based on search optimization proposed recently by the author and…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
We show that, due to the nonlinear nature of gravity, fluctuations in spacetime curvature generate additional gravitational attraction. This fluctuation-induced extra attraction was overlooked in the conventional understanding of the…
We consider an open universe created by bubble nucleation, and study possible effects of an "ancestor vacuum" (de Sitter space in which bubble nucleation occurred) on the present universe. We compute vacuum expectation values of…
Quantum gravitational back-reaction offers the potential of simultaneously resolving the problem of the cosmological constant and providing a natural model of inflation in which scalars play no special role. In this model inflation begins…
The dynamics of false vacuum decay at the end of inflation is studied. It is shown that the creation of a new phase is mainly stimulated by temperature fluctuations. Moving walls of O(3)-symmetric bubbles weakly interact with their…
We study the observable implications of an incomplete first order phase transition during inflation. In such a phase transition, the nucleated bubbles do not percolate and instead are continuously produced until the onset of reheating. The…
We present new solutions of vacuum decay in non-Minkowski spacetimes. On a de Sitter background, the tunneling between vacuum states with a nonvanishing energy difference has been considered, whereas in the special case of degenerate vacua…