Related papers: Some Connections between Quantum Tunneling and Inf…
Open inflation scenario is attracting a renewed interest in the context of string landscape. Since there are a large number of metastable de Sitter vacua in string landscape, tunneling transitions to lower metastable vacua through the…
This contribution consists of two parts. In the first part, I review the tunneling approach to quantum cosmology and comment on the alternative approaches. In the second part, I discuss the relation between quantum cosmology and eternal…
We show why the universe started in an unstable de Sitter state. The quantum origin of our universe implies one must take a `top down' approach to the problem of initial conditions in cosmology, in which the histories that contribute to the…
An interacting scalar field with largish coupling to curvature can support a distinctive inflationary universe scenario. Previously this has been discussed for the Standard Model Higgs field, treated classically or in a leading log…
The tunneling Hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wavefunctions. Here, we apply a generalization of the way we formed appropriate wave…
Dynamical models of inflation are given with composite inflatons by means of massive supersymmetric gauge theory. Nearly flat directions and stable massive ones in the potential are identified and slow-roll during inflation is examined.…
We study the cosmological inflation from the viewpoint of the moduli stabilization. We study the scenario that the superpotential has a large value during the inflation era enough to stabilize moduli, but it is small in the true vacuum.…
We study Coleman-De Luccia tunneling of the Standard Model Higgs field during inflation in the case when the electroweak vacuum is metastable. We verify that the tunneling rate is exponentially suppressed. The main contribution to the…
A new family of inflationary models is introduced and analysed. The behaviour of the parameters characterising the models suggest preferred values, which generate the most interesting testable predictions. Results are further improved if…
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…
In loop quantum gravity, modifications to the geometrical density cause a self-interacting scalar field to accelerate away from a minimum of its potential. In principle, this mechanism can generate the conditions that subsequently lead to…
The existence of the inflationary era in the early Universe seems to be strongly supported by recent CMB observations. However, only a few realistic inflation scenarios which have close relation to particle physics seem to have been known…
In this paper, we investigate models where a scalar field driving inflation is minimally coupled with gravity and it is subjected to a scalar potential. We present several examples of coupling between the field and gravity, and we furnish…
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…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. I describe the quantum origin of density perturbations, giving a heuristic derivation of…
Due to intra-field gravitational interactions, field configurations have a strong negative component to their energy density at the planckian and transplanckian scales, conceivably resulting in a sequestration of the transplanckian field…
Most models of inflation have small parameters, either to guarantee sufficient inflation or the correct magnitude of the density perturbations. In this paper we show that, in supersymmetric theories with weak scale supersymmetry breaking,…
We show that simple strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theories with quantum moduli spaces can naturally lead to hybrid inflation. These theories contain no input dimensionful or small parameters. The effective superpotential is linear…
Inflation is often described through the dynamics of a scalar field, slow-rolling in a suitable potential. Ultimately, this inflaton must be identified as the expectation value of a quantum field, evolving in a quantum effective potential.…
Moduli with flat or run-away classical potentials are generic in theories based on supersymmetry and extra dimensions. They mix between themselves and with matter fields in kinetic terms and in the nonperturbative superpotentials. As the…