Related papers: Two Tunnels to Inflation
In the path integral approach to false vacuum decay with the effect of gravity, there is an unsolved problem, called the negative mode problem. We show that the appearance of a supercritical supercurvature mode in the one-bubble open…
We compute the probability distribution for bubble collisions in an inflating false vacuum which decays by bubble nucleation. Our analysis generalizes previous work of Guth, Garriga, and Vilenkin to the case of general cosmological…
A standard approach to analyzing tunneling processes in various physical contexts is to use instanton or imaginary time path techniques. For systems in which the tunneling takes place in a time dependent setting, the standard methods are…
A static non-singular 10-dimensional closed Friedmann universe of Planck size, filled with a perfect fluid with an equation of state with w = -2/3, can arise spontaneously by a quantum fluctuation from nothing in 11-dimensional spacetime. A…
We revisit the path integral description of quantum tunneling and lay the groundwork for its generalization to excites states through real-time path integral techniques. For clarity, we focus on the simple toy model of a point particle in a…
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…
The discoveries of LIGO/Virgo black holes in recent years have revitalized the study of primordial black holes. In this work, we investigate a mechanism where primordial black holes are formed by vacuum bubbles that randomly nucleate during…
False vacuum states are metastable in quantum field theories, and true vacuum bubbles can be nucleated due to the quantum tunneling effect. It was recently suggested that an evaporating black hole (BH) can be a catalyst of bubble…
Bubbles of nothing are a class of vacuum decay processes present in some theories with compactified extra dimensions. We investigate the existence and properties of bubbles of nothing in models where the scalar pseudomoduli controlling the…
We calculate analytically the bubble nucleation rate in a model of first order inflation which is able to produce large scale structure. The computation includes the first-order departure from the thin-wall limit, the explicit derivation of…
The quantum field theory for a massless scalar field on a two-dimensional non-singular black hole spacetime gives a non-vanishing probability for a particle to tunnel out of the black hole. The black hole spacetime contains an outer and an…
We study the quantization of the Einstein-Hilbert action for a small true vacuum bubble without matter or scalar field. The quantization of action induces an extra term of potential called quantum potential in Hamilton-Jacobi equation,…
We consider the generalisation of quantum tunneling transitions in the WKB approximation to the time-independent functional Schr\"odinger and Wheeler-DeWitt equations. Following a Lorentzian approach, we compute the transition rates among…
The tunneling Hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wave functions. Here we present a generalization of the tunneling Hamiltonian to quantum…
We discuss various models of inflationary universe with $\Omega \not = 1$. A homogeneous universe with $\Omega > 1$ may appear due to creation of the universe "from nothing" in the theories where the effective potential becomes very steep…
Many models of high energy physics possess metastable vacua. It is conceivable that the universe can get trapped in such a false vacuum, irrespective of its origin and prior history, at an earlier stage during its evolution. The ensuing…
We revisit the problem of the "probability of inflation" from the point of view of the Einstein-Cartan theory, where torsion can be present off-shell even in the absence of spinorial currents. An informal estimate suggests that the barrier…
Quantum cosmology uses a wave function to model the universe, but finding solutions for this poses a problem as it is difficult to define the boundary conditions or identify the correct path for a path integral. We begin the discussion by…
In Chain Inflation the universe tunnels along a series of false vacua of ever-decreasing energy. The main goal of this paper is to embed Chain Inflation in high energy fundamental physics. We begin by illustrating a simple effective…
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…