Related papers: Transitions Between de Sitter Minima

In this paper we use and extend the results present in \cite{1,2,3,4} and in particular in \cite{4} to obtain a statistical description of the cosmological constant in a cosmological de Sitter universe in terms of massless excitations with…

We present a detailed discussion of the inflationary scenario in the context of inhomogeneous cosmologies. After a review of the fundamental features characterizing the inflationary model, as referred to a homogeneous and isotropic…

Precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background by WMAP are believed to have established a flat $\Lambda$-dominated universe, seeded by nearly scale-invariant adiabatic primordial fluctuations. However by relaxing the hypothesis…

We perform a detailed study of the existence and the properties of O(4)-invariant instanton solutions in Einstein-scalar theory in the presence of flat potential barriers, i.e. barriers where the second derivative of the potential is small…

A Multiverse can arise from landscapes without de Sitter minima. It can be populated during a period of eternal inflation without trans-Planckian field excursions and without flat potentials. This Multiverse can explain the values of the…

We investigate the negative modes about Coleman-De Luccia bounces governing vacuum transitions in de Sitter space, with the goal of gaining physical insight into the various anomalous results associated with these that have been reported in…

Within the context of finding the initial conditions of the universe we consider gravitational instantons falling into the Bianchi IX classification. That is, a Euclidean four-manifold with a metric that satisfies Einstein's equations with…

We present a short review of possible applications of the Wheeler-De Witt equation to cosmological models based on the low-energy string effective action, and characterised by an initial regime of asymptotically flat, low energy, weak…

We consider the decay of a false vacuum in circumstances where the methods suggested by Coleman run into difficulties. We find that in these cases quantum fluctuations play a crucial role. Namely, they naturally induce both an ultraviolet…

We investigate the cosmology of a recently proposed deformation of Einstein gravity, emerging from quantum gravity heuristics. The theory is constructed to have de Sitter space as a vacuum solution, and thus to be relevant to the…

We identify instantons representing vacuum decay in a 6-dimensional toy model for string theory flux compactifications, with the two extra dimensions compactified on a sphere. We evaluate the instanton action for tunneling between different…

We consider in detail how the quantum-mechanical tunneling phenomenon occurs in a well-behaved octic potential. Our main tool will be the euclidean propagator just evaluated between two minima of the potential at issue. For such a purpose…

We construct a four-dimensional consistent truncation to the bosonic part of the universal sector of Calabi-Yau IIA compactification (i.e. the gravity multiplet, one vectormultiplet, and one hypermultiplet) in the presence of background…

We study the cosmological properties of a metastable de Sitter vacuum obtained recently in the framework of type IIB flux compactifications in the presence of three D7-brane stacks, based on perturbative quantum corrections at both…

We investigate cosmological scenarios with a non-minimal derivative coupling between the scalar field and the curvature, examining both the quintessence and the phantom cases in zero and constant potentials. In general, we find that the…

A new cosmological model implies that dR/dt is constant for both t > t_c and t goes to 0, and that dR^2/dt is proportional to n_s^-1 for t_c > t > 0. Here R(t) is the cosmic scale factor, t_c is a crossover time defined in the text, and n_s…

We find constrained instantons in Einstein gravity with and without a cosmological constant. These configurations are not saddle points of the Einstein-Hilbert action, yet they contribute to non-perturbative processes in quantum gravity. In…

If the current acceleration of our Universe is due to a cosmological constant, then a Coleman-De Luccia bubble will nucleate in our Universe. In this work, we consider that our observations could be likely in this framework, consisting in…

We study homogeneous gravitational instantons, conventionally called the Hawking-Moss (HM) instantons, in bigravity theory. The HM instantons describe the amplitude of quantum tunneling from a false vacuum to the true vacuum. Corrections to…

If the Hartle-Hawking wave function is the correct boundary condition of our universe, the history of our universe will be well approximated by an instanton. Although this instanton should be classicalized at infinity, as long as we are…