Two tunnels to inflation

Anthony Aguirre and Matthew C. Johnson
Phys. Rev. D 73, 123529 – Published 26 June 2006

Abstract

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 semiclassical Hamiltonian methods, and find that—assuming both process are allowed—neither mechanism dominates in all regimes.

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  • Received 5 December 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.73.123529

©2006 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Anthony Aguirre and Matthew C. Johnson

  • Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA

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Issue

Vol. 73, Iss. 12 — 15 June 2006

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