Vacuum Structure of de Sitter Space

Abstract

In the in-/out-state formalism we find the exact one-loop effective action of a massive scalar field in the global coordinates of de Sitter spaces, which is a gravity analog of the Heisenberg-Euler action in QED. The nonperturbative effective action, modulo the angular momentum sum, has an imaginary part in all even dimensions, but the imaginary part of the effective action is zero in all odd dimensions. However, in the zeta-function regularization for angular momenta, the weak-curvature expansion of the renormalized effective action vanishes in any even dimension, while the real part is finite in any odd dimension. This implies that de Sitter spaces may be stable against particle production at one-loop.

LaTex 16 pages, no figure

References in corpus (2)

• The IR stability of de Sitter: Loop corrections to scalar propagators
• The Stokes Phenomenon and Quantum Tunneling for de Sitter Radiation in Nonstationary Coordinates

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Infrared Sensitivity of Unstable Vacua
• Effect of a magnetic field on Schwinger mechanism in de Sitter spacetime
• Schwinger Pair Production in Solitonic Gauge Fields
• QED Effective Actions in Space-Dependent Gauge and Electromagnetic Duality
• Scalar and Spinor Effective Actions in Global de Sitter
• Lessons from Schwinger Effective Action for Black Holes