Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Scientific paper
2005-12-06
Phys.Rev. D73 (2006) 123529
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
16 PRD-style pages, 13 figures. PRD, in press. Revised to match published version
Scientific paper
10.1103/PhysRevD.73.123529
We investigate the formation via tunneling of inflating (false-vacuum) bubbles in a true-vacuum background, and the reverse process. Using effective potentials from the junction condition formalism, all true- and false-vacuum bubble solutions with positive interior and exterior cosmological constant, and arbitrary mass are catalogued. We find that tunneling through the same effective potential appears to describe two distinct processes: one in which the initial and final states are separated by a wormhole (the Farhi-Guth-Guven mechanism), and one in which they are either in the same hubble volume or separated by a cosmological horizon. In the zero-mass limit, the first process corresponds to the creation of an inhomogenous universe from nothing, while the second mechanism is equivalent to the nucleation of true- or false-vacuum Coleman-De Luccia bubbles. We compute the probabilities of both mechanisms in the WKB approximation using semi-classical Hamiltonian methods, and find that -- assuming both process are allowed -- neither mechanism dominates in all regimes.
Aguirre Anthony
Johnson Matthew C.
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