Related papers: Colliding with a Crunching Bubble
After inflation occurs, a weakly coupled scalar field will in general not be in thermal equilibrium but have a distribution of values determined by the inflationary Hubble parameter. If such a field subsequently undergoes discrete symmetry…
General Relativity allows for a cosmological constant ($\Lambda$) which has inspired models of cosmic Inflation and Dark Energy. We show instead that $r_\Lambda = \sqrt{3/\Lambda}$ corresponds to an event horizon: a causal boundary term in…
It has been recently shown that meta-stable domain walls exist in high-density QCD ($\mu\neq 0$) as well as in QCD with large number of colors ($N_c\to\infty$), with the lifetime being exponentially long in both cases. Such metastable…
We study the covariant entropy bound in the context of gravitational collapse. First, we discuss critically the heuristic arguments advanced by Bousso. Then we solve the problem through an exact model: a Tolman-Bondi dust shell collapsing…
Within the context of a first-order phase transition in the early Universe, we study the collision process for vacuum bubbles expanding in a plasma. The effects of the plasma are simulated by introducing a damping term in the equations of…
Motivated by the discovery of a plenitude of metastable vacua in a string landscape and the possibility of rapid tunneling between these vacua, we revisit the dynamics of a false vacuum bubble in a background de Sitter spacetime. We find…
Black holes with sufficiently large initial charge and mass will Hawking-evaporate towards the extremal limit. The emission slows as the temperature approaches zero, but still reaches the point where a single Hawking quantum would make the…
We present simple, analytic solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell equation, which describe an arbitrary number of charged black holes in a spacetime with positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$. In the limit $\Lambda=0$, these solutions reduce…
We construct an exact solution describing the collision of two Kaluza-Klein "bubbles of nothing" in 3+1 dimensions. When the bubbles collide, a curvature singularity forms which is hidden inside an event horizon. However, unlike the…
The Raychaudhuri equation for null rays is a powerful tool for finding consistent embeddings of cosmological bubbles into a background spacetime in a way that is largely independent of the matter content. We find that spatially flat or…
In this paper we explore the idea that black holes can persist in a universe that collapses to a big crunch and then bounces into a new phase of expansion. We use a scalar field to model the matter content of such a universe {near the time}…
We establish results on the dynamics of interacting charged null fluids in general relativity, specifically in the context of the bouncing continuation proposed in [Ori91]. In this model - the setting for a number of prominent case studies…
We develop a set of controlled, analytic approximations to study the effects of bubble collisions on cosmology. We expand the initial perturbation to the inflaton field caused by the collision in a general power series, and determine its…
A scenario for a quantum big crunch to big bang transition is proposed. We first clarify the similarities between this transition and the final stages of black hole evaporation. The black hole and the universe are thought of as quantum…
In this paper the currently held view that the endpoint of gravitational collapse is a singularity is refuted. A quantum mechanical calculation is done showing that spin 0 and spin 1/2 particles inside a black hole's schwarzschild radius…
Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…
In supersymmetric theories the mass of any state is bounded below by the values of some of its charges. The corresponding bounds in case of Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes are known to coincide with the requirement that…
An inflationary scenario that leads to $\Omega _0<1$ today is presented. An epoch of `old' inflation during which the smoothness and horizon problems are solved is followed by a shortened epoch of `new' inflation. Old inflation exits…
We propose a novel explanation for the smallness of the observed cosmological constant (CC). Regions of space with a large CC are short lived and are dynamically driven to crunch soon after the end of inflation. Conversely, regions with a…
We study strongly supercooled cosmological phase transitions. We perform numerical lattice simulations of two-bubble collisions and demonstrate that, depending on the scalar potential, in the collision the field can either bounce to a false…