Related papers: Transitions Between de Sitter Minima
We study the instantons describing the production of particles at the ends of codimension-one objects (strings and struts) in $(2+1)$-dimensional Minkowski and de Sitter spaces. A Minkowskian background allows only for systems with…
We study the formation of gravitating global strings through quantum mechanical tunneling. The instantons that describe the nucleation process are characterized by two parameters: the string core thickness and its gravitational backreaction…
We interpret the Euclidean solution of JT de Sitter gravity as the Coleman-de Luccia instanton for the decay of the low-entropy horizon of its static patch solution into either a Big Crunch or an infinite-entropy Lorentzian de Sitter…
It is well known that string theories naturally compactify on anti-de Sitter spaces, and yet cosmological observations show no evidence of a negative cosmological constant in the early Universe's evolution. In this letter we present two…
We show that the instability of the singular Vilenkin instanton describing the creation of an open universe can be avoided using, instead of a minimally coupled scalar field, an axionic massless scalar field which gives rise to the…
The four-form field recently considered by Hawking and Turok couples naturally to a charged membrane, across which the effective cosmological constant has a discontinuity. We present instantons for the creation of an open inflationary…
There are at least two cosmological constants calling for explanation. The first one describes the quasi-de Sitter inflation in the early universe, and the second describes the current acceleration of the universe associated with dark…
We investigate the decay rate of a false vacuum state in de Sitter space at high Hubble rates, using two methods: the Hawking-Moss instanton method which is fully quantum mechanical but relies on the saddle-point approximation, and 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…
Nucleation of branes by a four-form field has recently been considered in string motivated scenarios for the neutralization of the cosmological constant. An interesting question in this context is whether the nucleation of stacks of…
As a first step toward understanding a lanscape of vacua in a theory of non-linear massive gravity, we consider a landscape of a single scalar field and study tunneling between a pair of adjacent vacua. We study the Hawking-Moss (HM)…
We study the decay of the cosmological constant in two spacetime dimensions through production of pairs. We show that the same nucleation process looks as quantum mechanical tunneling (instanton) to one Killing observer and as thermal…
We consider the vacuum decay of the flat Minkowski space to an anti-de Sitter space. We find a one-parameter family of potentials that allow exact, analytical instanton solutions describing tunneling without barriers in the presence of…
Instantons and their quantisation in pure Yang-Mills theory formulated in the background of de Sitter spacetime represented by spatially-closed ($k = 1$) Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric are discussed. As for the classical treatment of the…
Current observational data is consistent with the universe being slightly closed. We investigate families of singular and non-singular closed instantons that could describe the beginning of a closed inflationary universe. We calculate the…
Recent investigations seem to favor a cosmological dynamics according to which the accelerated expansion of the Universe may have already peaked and is now slowing down again \cite{sastaro}. As a consequence, the cosmic acceleration may be…
A refined version of a recently introduced method for analysing the dynamics of an inhomogeneous irrotational dust universe is presented. A fully non-perturbative numerical computation of the time dependence of volume in this framework…
The small instanton transition of a five-brane colliding with one end of the S1/Z2 interval in heterotic M-theory is discussed, with emphasis on the transition moduli, their potential function and the associated non-perturbative…
In this paper we study the cosmological constant emerging from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation as an eigenvalue of the related Sturm-Liouville problem. We employ Gaussian trial functionals and we perform a mode decomposition to extract the…
We investigate the instanton solution between the degenerate vacua in curved space. We show that there exist $O(4)$-symmetric solutions not only in de Sitter but also in both flat and anti-de Sitter space. The geometry of the new type of…