English

Swampland Constraints on No-Boundary Quantum Cosmology

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2020-11-03 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal describes the quantum creation of the universe. To have a non-negligible probability to obtain a classical expanding universe, eternal inflation is required, which is severely constrained by Swampland conjectures such as the refined de Sitter conjecture and the distance conjecture. We discuss this issue in detail and demonstrate the incompatibility. We show that the dimensionless parameters in the refined de Sitter conjecture should be bounded from above by a positive power of the scalar potential to realize the classical expanding universe. In other words, the probability of the classical expanding universe is extremely small under the Swampland conjectures unless the parameters are much smaller than unity. If they are order unity, on the other hand, the saddle-point solution itself ceases to exist implying a genuinely quantum universe.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.03443,
  title  = {Swampland Constraints on No-Boundary Quantum Cosmology},
  author = {Hiroki Matsui and Takahiro Terada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.03443},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

34 pages, 14 figures; published version, minor corrections in Appendix

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:05:24.366Z