Related papers: Transitions Between de Sitter Minima
We discuss the possibility of quantum transitions from the string perturbative vacuum to cosmological configurations characterized by isotropic contraction and decreasing dilaton. When the dilaton potential preserves the sign of the Hubble…
The recent measurement of a cutoff k_min in the fluctuation power spectrum P(k) of the cosmic microwave background may vitiate the possibility that slow-roll inflation can simultaneously solve the horizon problem and account for the…
We consider a universe with a positive effective cosmological constant and a nonminimally coupled scalar field. When the coupling constant is negative, the scalar field exhibits linear growth at asymptotically late times, resulting in a…
Instantons, which are non-perturbative solutions to Yang-Mills equations, provide a signal for the occurrence of quantum tunneling between distinct classes of vacua. They can give rise to decays of particles otherwise forbidden. Using data…
We address the issue of constructing continuous instantons representing the pair creation of black holes in a cosmological context. The recent attempt at constructing such solutions using virtual domain walls is reviewed first. We then…
Quantum transitions among de Sitter and Minkowski spacetimes through bubble nucleation are revisited using the Hamiltonian formalism. We interpret tunnelling probabilities as relative probabilities: the ratio of the squared wave functionals…
We study the momentum-space entanglement between the sub- and super-Hubble modes of a spectator scalar field, with a cubic $\lambda \phi^3$ interaction, in de Sitter space. Momentum-space entanglement has some universal properties for any…
We present and describe an exact solution of Einstein's equations which represents a snapping cosmic string in a vacuum background with a cosmological constant $\Lambda$. The snapping of the string generates an impulsive spherical…
The cosmological constant, i.e., the energy density stored in the true vacuum state of all existing fields in the Universe, is the simplest and the most natural possibility to describe the current cosmic acceleration. However, despite its…
We discuss the cosmological implications of the string swampland conjectures for late-time cosmology, and test them against a wide range of state of the art cosmological observations. The refined de Sitter conjecture constrains either the…
This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We introduce a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum…
Although all interactions in the Standard Model generate nonzero shifts of the vacuum energy and pressure, gravity does not interact with them. Assuming (i) that the reason why it is so breaks down at some scale $M_g$ and that (ii) the…
In abstract Yang-Mills theory the standard instanton construction relies on the Hodge star having real eigenvalues which makes it inapplicable in the Lorentzian case. We show that for the affine connection an instanton-type construction can…
Decay of a de Sitter vacuum may proceed through a "static" instanton, representing pair creation of critical bubbles separated by a distance comparable to the Hubble radius -- a process somewhat analogous to thermal activation in flat…
In this work, we investigate $O(4)$-symmetric instantons within the Eddington-inspired-Born-Infeld gravity theory (EiBI). We discuss the regular Hawking-Moss instanton and find that the tunneling rate reduces to the General Relativity (GR)…
We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub…
A new solution of the Einstein equations for the point mass immersed in the de Sitter Universe is presented. The properties of the metric are very different from both the Schwarzschild black hole and the de Sitter Universe: it is everywhere…
It is known that there is a quantum mechanical tunneling process which, through nucleation of a membrane, induces a transition between two de Sitter spaces, lowering the cosmological constant. It is shown in this paper that a different,…
The problem of the physical nature and the cosmological genesis of Lambda-term is discussed. This problem can't be solved in terms of the current quantum field theory which operates with Higgs and non-perturbative vacuum condensates and…
It has been claimed that the string landscape predicts an open universe, with negative curvature. The prediction is a consequence of a large number of metastable string vacua, and the properties of the Coleman--De Luccia instanton which…