Creation of wormholes by quantum tunnelling in modified gravity theories
arXiv:1407.6026 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.90.124015
Abstract
We study the process of quantum tunnelling in scalar-tensor theories in which the scalar field is non-minimally coupled to gravity. In these theories gravitational instantons can deviate substantially from sphericity and can in fact develop a neck - a feature prohibited in theories with minimal coupling. Such instantons with necks lead to the materialisation of bubble geometries containing a wormhole region. We clarify the relationship of neck geometries to violations of the null energy condition, and also derive a bound on the size of the neck relative to that of the instanton.
15 pages, 7 figures, v2: typos corrected, discussion extended, matches published version
References in corpus (9)
- The Standard Model Higgs boson as the inflaton
- New Ekpyrotic Cosmology
- Higgs inflation at the critical point
- Cosmological Perturbations Through a Non-Singular Ghost-Condensate/Galileon Bounce
- The false vacuum bubble nucleation due to a nonminimally coupled scalar field
- The number of negative modes of the oscillating bounces
- Dynamics of false vacuum bubbles in Brans-Dicke theory
- Nucleation of vacuum bubbles in Brans-Dicke type theory
- Horizons and Tunneling in the Euclidean False Vacuum