相关论文: Homogeneous Modes of Cosmological Instantons
We compute, from first principles, the quantum fluctuations about instanton saddle points of the Euclidean path integral for Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field. The Euclidean two-point correlator is analytically continued into the…
We study the negative modes of gravitational instantons representing vacuum decay in asymptotically flat space-time. We consider two different vacuum decay scenarios: the Coleman-de Luccia $\mathrm{O}(4)$-symmetric bubble, and…
We investigate in detail the properties of oscillating instanton solutions discussed recently in the literature. We find that the solutions with N nodes contain exactly N homogeneous negative modes in their spectrum of linear perturbations.…
A broad class of higher dimensional instanton solutions are found for a theory which contains gravity, a scalar field and antisymmetric tensor fields of arbitrary rank. The metric used, a warp product of an arbitrary number of any compact…
The usual (type A) thin-wall Coleman-de Luccia instanton is made by a bigger-than-half sphere of the false vacuum and a smaller-than-half sphere of the true vacuum. It has a the standard O(4) symmetric negative mode associated with changing…
Positive definiteness of the quadratic part of the action of the Hawking-Turok instanton is investigated. The Euclidean quadratic action for scalar perturbations is expressed in terms of a single gauge invariant quantity $q$. The mode…
In these lecture notes, I describe the motivation behind a recent formulation of a non-perturbative gravitational path integral for Lorentzian (instead of the usual Euclidean) space-times, and give a pedagogical introduction to its main…
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…
In this paper, we study Einstein gravity with a minimally coupled scalar field accompanied with a potential, assuming an O(4) symmetric metric ansatz. We call an Euclidean instanton is to be an oscillating instanton, if there exists a point…
The behavior of the action of the instantons describing vacuum decay in a de Sitter is investigated. For a near-to-limit instanton (a Coleman-de Luccia instanton close to some Hawking-Moss instanton) we find approximate formulas for 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…
We develop a general framework for effective equations of expectation values in quantum cosmology and pose for them the quantum Cauchy problem with no-boundary and tunneling wavefunctions. Cosmological configuration space is decomposed into…
The Euclidean path integral is well approximated by instantons. If instantons are dynamical, then instantons are necessarily complexified. These fuzzy instantons can have various physical applications. In slow-roll inflation models, fuzzy…
Quantum fluctuation of unstable modes about gravitational instantons causes the instability of flat space at finite temperature, leading to the spontaneous process of nucleating quantum black holes. The density of vacuum energy-gain in such…
A phase-space approach to quantum-deformed gravity is developed. Following its reduction to an effective four-dimensional spacetime structure, we utilize it in reanalyzing the cosmic inflationary dynamics and quantum gravity. The…
Quantum creation of the universe is described by the {\em density matrix} defined by the Euclidean path integral. This yields an ensemble of universes -- a cosmological landscape -- in a mixed quasi-thermal state which is shown to be…
The path integral over Euclidean geometries for the recently suggested density matrix of the Universe is shown to describe a microcanonical ensemble in quantum cosmology. This ensemble corresponds to a uniform (weight one) distribution in…
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)…
A step feature in the inflaton potential can model a transient breakdown of slow-roll inflation. Here we generalize the step feature to include space-dependence, allowing it also to model a breakdown of homogeneity and isotropy. The…
The usual description of inflationary fluctuations uses the framework of quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime, in which quantum fluctuations are superimposed on a classical background spacetime. Even for large fluctuations, such…