Coleman-de Luccia Tunneling and the Gibbons-Hawking Temperature

Abstract

We study Coleman-de Luccia tunneling in some detail. We show that, for a single scalar field potential with a true and a false vacuum, there are four types of tunneling, depending on the properties of the potential. A general tunneling process involves a combination of thermal (Gibbons-Hawking temperature) fluctuation part way up the barrier followed by quantum tunneling. The thin-wall approximation is a special limit of the case (of only quantum tunneling) where inside the nucleation bubble is the true vacuum while the outside reaches the false vacuum. Hawking-Moss tunneling is the (only thermal fluctuation) limit of the case where the inside of the bubble does not reach the true vacuum at the moment of its creation, and the outside is cut off by the de Sitter horizon before it reaches the false vacuum. We estimate the corrections to the Hawking-Moss formula, which can be large. In all cases, we see that the bounce of the Euclidean action decreases rapidly as the vacuum energy density increases, signaling that the tunneling is not exponentially suppressed. In some sense, this phenomenon may be interpreted as a finite temperature effect due to the Gibbons-Hawking temperature of the de Sitter space. As an application, we discuss the implication of this tunneling property to the cosmic landscape.

38 pages, 11 figures, ref. added, minor revisions

References in corpus (8)

• Random Matrices and the Spectrum of N-flation
• Thermal derivation of the Coleman-De Luccia tunneling prescription
• Probabilities in the landscape: The decay of nearly flat space
• Transitions Between de Sitter Minima
• Hawking-Moss bounces and vacuum decay rates
• A New View of the Cosmic Landscape
• The Cosmological Constant Problem and Inflation in the String Landscape
• A Renormalization Group Approach to the Cosmological Constant Problem

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Probable or Improbable Universe? Correlating Electroweak Vacuum Instability with the Scale of Inflation
• False Vacuum Decay Catalyzed by Black Holes
• Black holes as bubbles of AdS
• Cosmological Constant from Decoherence
• Analyzing Multi-Field Tunneling With Exact Bounce Solutions
• Instanton solutions mediating tunneling between the degenerate vacua in curved space
• Oscillating instanton solutions in curved space
• Instability of De Sitter Spacetime induced by Quantum Conformal Anomaly
• Entropic interpretation of the Hawking-Moss bounce
• Numerical Analysis of Coleman-de Luccia Tunneling
• Remote Hawking-Moss instanton and the Lorentzian path integral