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Related papers: No-boundary prescriptions in Lorentzian quantum co…

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We argue that the Lorentzian path integral is a better starting point for quantum cosmology than the Euclidean version. In particular, we revisit the mini-superspace calculation of the Feynman path integral for quantum gravity with a…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2017-05-24 Job Feldbrugge , Jean-Luc Lehners , Neil Turok

We present a theory of tunnelling geometries originating from the no-boundary quantum state of Hartle and Hawking. We reformulate the no-boundary wavefunction in the representation of true physical variables and calculate it in the one-loop…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2011-07-19 A. O. Barvinsky , A. Yu. Kamenshchik

We revisit the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal. To extract probabilities, one must use the gravitational path integral (GPI) to compute not only the no-boundary amplitude, but also the norms by which its square is divided. We find that…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2026-02-04 Ahmed I. Abdalla , Stefano Antonini , Raphael Bousso , Luca V. Iliesiu , Adam Levine , Arvin Shahbazi-Moghaddam

An alternative formulation of the no-boundary initial state of the universe in the Euclidean quantum theory of gravity is proposed. Unlike the no-boundary Hartle-Hawking wave function, in which time appears together with macroscopic…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2023-10-24 Natalia Gorobey , Alexander Lukyanenko , A. V. Goltsev

We consider quantization of the positive curvature Friedmann cosmology in the unimodular modification of Einstein's theory, in which the spacetime four-volume appears as an explicit time variable. The Hamiltonian admits self-adjoint…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2007-05-23 Alan Daughton , Jorma Louko , Rafael D. Sorkin

A consistent variational procedure applied to the gravitational action requires according to Gibbons and Hawking a certain balance between the volume and boundary parts of the action. We consider the problem of preserving this balance in…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2009-10-28 A. O. Barvinsky , S. N. Solodukhin

The Hartle-Hawking state is a proposal for a preferred initial state for quantum gravity, based on a path integral over all compact Euclidean four-geometries which have a given three-geometry as a boundary. The wave function constructed…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2017-05-03 Satya Dhandhukiya , Hanno Sahlmann

Gravitational path-integral over $\mathbb{R}\times S^3$ complex metrics with fluctuations is studied in 4D for Einstein-Hilbert gravity in Lorentzian signature, with the aim to investigate the IR properties of complex saddles for various…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2026-04-24 Shubhashis Mallik , Gaurav Narain

It was recently shown by Feldbrugge et al. that the no-boundary proposal, defined via a Lorentzian path integral and in minisuperspace, leads to unstable fluctuations, in disagreement with early universe observations. In these calculations…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2018-11-14 Alice Di Tucci , Jean-Luc Lehners

The bulk (Einstein-Hilbert) and boundary (Gibbons-Hawking) terms in the gravitational action are generally renormalized differently when integrating out quantum fluctuations. The former is affected by nonminimal couplings, while the latter…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2014-03-26 Ted Jacobson , Alejandro Satz

We study spectral action for Riemannian manifolds with boundary, and then generalize this to noncommutative spaces which are products of a Riemannian manifold times a finite space. We determine the boundary conditions consistent with the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2010-11-23 Ali H. Chamseddine , Alain Connes

In this article, we study the no-boundary wave function in scalar-tensor gravity with various potentials for the non-minimally coupled scalar field. Our goal is to calculate probabilities for the scalar field - and hence the effective…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2015-05-28 Dong-il Hwang , Hanno Sahlmann , Dong-han Yeom

In 1983, Hartle and Hawking proposed the no-boundary proposal, suggesting that the universe has no beginning in the sense of a spacetime singularity or boundary. Nevertheless, there is an origin of time. Mathematically, this involves…

Differential Geometry · Mathematics 2026-03-26 N. E. Rieger , W. Hasse

The Wheeler-DeWitt (WDW) equation is analyzed using two boundary proposals: the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary condition and tunneling condition. By compactifying the scale factor $a$ into $ x = a/(1+a) $, we reformulate the WDW equation to…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2025-03-28 Jie Jiang , Deog Ki Hong , Dong-han Yeom

The Lorentzian path integral for the wave function of the Universe is only conditionally convergent and thus requires a well-defined prescription. The Picard-Lefschetz approach ensures convergence through contour deformation, but it has…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2025-11-18 Masaki Yamada

In the derivation of the Einstein field equations via Hamilton's principle, the inclusion of a boundary term is essential to render the variational problem well-posed, as it addresses variations that do not vanish at the boundary of the…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2025-06-04 Ángel Cuevas , Javier Chagoya , C. Ortiz

In quantum cosmology the DeWitt boundary condition is a proposal to set the wave function of the universe to vanish at the classical big-bang singularity. In this Letter, we show that in many gravitational theories including general…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2022-08-08 Hiroki Matsui , Shinji Mukohyama , Atsushi Naruko

We give a detailed treatment of the back-reaction effects on the Hawking spectrum in the late-time expansion within the semiclassical approach to the Hawking radiation. We find that the boundary value problem defining the action of the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2013-05-30 Pietro Menotti

Recent works have suggested that the no-boundary proposal should be defined as a sum over regular, not necessarily compact, metrics. We show that such a prescription can be implemented in the presence of a scalar field. For concreteness, we…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-03-09 Caroline Jonas , Jean-Luc Lehners , Vincent Meyer

The Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action is well-known to be unbounded below and thus to raise many questions regarding the definition of the gravitational path integral. A variety of works since the late 1980's have suggested that this…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-08-28 Gary T. Horowitz , Donald Marolf , Jorge E. Santos