Related papers: Hawking-Moss instanton in nonlinear massive gravit…
We study homogeneous gravitational instantons, conventionally called the Hawking-Moss (HM) instantons, in bigravity theory. The HM instantons describe the amplitude of quantum tunneling from a false vacuum to the true vacuum. Corrections to…
The conventional interpretation of the Hawking-Moss (HM) solution implies a transition rate between vacua that depends only on the values of the potential in the initial vacuum and at the top of a potential barrier, leading to the…
The Hawking-Moss (HM) bounce solution implies that the tunneling amplitude between vacua is uniquely determined by the vacuum energy at the initial vacuum and the top of a potential barrier, regardless of the field distance between them…
In this paper, we study Einstein gravity with a minimally coupled scalar field accompanied with a potential, assuming an O(4) symmetric metric ansatz. We call an Euclidean instanton is to be an oscillating instanton, if there exists a point…
In this work, we investigate $O(4)$-symmetric instantons within the Eddington-inspired-Born-Infeld gravity theory (EiBI). We discuss the regular Hawking-Moss instanton and find that the tunneling rate reduces to the General Relativity (GR)…
We study the Coleman-de Luccia (CDL) instanton characterizing the tunneling from a false vacuum to the true vacuum in a semi-classical way in dRGT (deRham-Gabadadze-Tolley) massive gravity theory, and evaluate the dependence of the…
I provide some simple physical arguments that, once gravitation and some subtleties are taken into account, rather broad classes of potentials result in instantons which tunnel relatively rapidly between perturbatively stable minima. In…
We study the quantum-mechanical tunneling phenomenon in models which include the existence of non-equivalent vacua. For such a purpose we evaluate the euclidean propagator between two minima of the potential at issue in terms of the…
We investigate the cosmological signatures of instantons mediating tunneling between de Sitter minima. For generic potentials the Coleman-de Luccia instanton does not necessarily exist; when it does not, the instanton which contributes to…
Motivated by our earlier argument that the apparent large cosmological constant from quantum fluctuations is actually an artifact of not using a full quantum mechanical superposition to determine the ground state in which the universe lives…
The relative probability to decay towards different vacua during inflation is studied. The calculation is performed in single-field slow-roll potentials using the stochastic inflation formalism. Various situations are investigated,…
We consider the possibility that tunneling in a degenerate double-well potential in de Sitter spacetime leads to coherent oscillations of quantum probability to find the system in a given well. We concentrate on the case when the mass scale…
We consider the statistical properties of vacua and inflationary trajectories associated with a random multifield potential. Our underlying motivation is the string landscape, but our calculations apply to general potentials. Using random…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
At the minisuperspace level of homogeneous models, the bare probability for a classical universe has a huge peak at small universes for the Hartle-Hawking `no-boundary' wavefunction, in contrast to the suppression at small universes for the…
The quantum behavior of noncommutative eternal inflation is quite different from the usual knowledge. Unlike the usual eternal inflation, the quantum fluctuation of noncommutative eternal inflation is suppressed by the Hubble parameter. Due…
Tunneling is a fascinating aspect of quantum mechanics that renders the local minima of a potential meta-stable, with important consequences for particle physics, for the early hot stage of the universe, and more speculatively, for the…
We study Coleman-de Luccia tunneling in some detail. We show that, for a single scalar field potential with a true and a false vacuum, there are four types of tunneling, depending on the properties of the potential. A general tunneling…
We compute tunneling in a quantum field theory in 1+1 dimensions for a field potential $U(\Phi)$ of the asymmetric double well type. The system is localized initially in the ``false vacuum''. We consider the case of a {\em compact space}…
We consider a particle bound to a two-dimensional plane and a double well potential, subject to a perpendicular uniform magnetic field . The energy difference between the lowest two eigenvalues--the eigenvalue splitting--is related to the…