Related papers: Towards a Solution of the Negative Mode Problem in…
We study the process of quantum tunnelling in scalar-tensor theories in which the scalar field is non-minimally coupled to gravity. In these theories gravitational instantons can deviate substantially from sphericity and can in fact develop…
The Planck scale is usually believed to be an unpassable wall. Putting a cutoff there and thinking of it as a quantized spacetime entity shows that. However, this is exactly the cause of many problems in quantum gravity. The cosmological…
A central aspect of the cosmological constant problem is to understand why vacuum energy does not gravitate. In order to account for this observation, while allowing for nontrivial dynamics of the quantum vacuum, we motivate a novel…
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…
Quantum fluctuations in the mazer are considered, arising either from the atomic motion or from the quantized intracavity field. Analytical results, for both the meza and the hyperbolic secant mode profile, predict for example an…
The unconstrained reduced action corresponding to the dynamics of scalar fluctuations about the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) background is derived using Dirac's method of description of singular Lagrangian systems. The results are…
We present evidence that there is a 4D model that satisfies the conditions of renormalizability and diffeomorphism invariance simultaneously at the 2-loop level. The traceless mode is treated perturbatively, while the conformal mode can be…
Quantum tunneling is considered from the point of view of local realism. It is concluded that a quantum object tunneling through a potential barrier cannot be interpreted as a point-like particle because such an interpretation generates a…
We investigate what becomes of the translational zero-mode of a five-dimensional domain wall in the presence of gravity, studying the scalar perturbations of a thick gravitating domain wall with AdS asymptotics and a well-defined…
All attempts to quantize gravity face several difficult problems. Among these problems are: (i) metric positivity (positivity of the spatial distance between distinct points), (ii) the presence of anomalies (partial second-class nature of…
We consider the uniqueness problem of a negative eigenvalue in the spectrum of small fluctuations about a bounce solution in a multidimensional case. Our approach is based on the concept of conjugate points from Morse theory and is a…
The vacuum of quantum fields contains correlated fluctuations. When restricted to one side of a surface these have a huge entropy of entanglement that scales with the surface area. If UV physics renders this entropy finite, then a…
Quasiclassical methods are used to define dynamical tunneling times in models of quantum cosmological bounces. These methods provide relevant new information compared with the traditional treatment of quantum tunneling by means of tunneling…
We show that Euclidean axion wormholes in theories of gravity coupled to a single axion have several independent inhomogeneous perturbations that lower the Euclidean action. Our analysis relies on a judiciously chosen gauge-invariant…
We study the stability of fracton gravity, a variant of linearized gravity where the gauge symmetry is restricted to longitudinal diffeomorphisms. These transformations can be connected to a spacetime generalization of dipole symmetry,…
We investigate various types of Fubini instantons in Dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravitation, which describe the decay of the vacuum state at a hilltop potential through the tunneling without a barrier. It is shown that the…
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…
We present a dequantization procedure based on a variational approach whereby quantum fluctuations latent in the quantum momentum are suppressed. This is done by adding generic local deformations to the quantum momentum operator which give…
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 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…