Creation of wormholes by quantum tunnelling in modified gravity theories

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.

arXiv comment15 pages, 7 figures, v2: typos corrected, discussion extended, matches published version

References in corpus (24)

• The Standard Model Higgs boson as the inflaton
• Does backreaction enforce the averaged null energy condition in semiclassical gravity?
• New Ekpyrotic Cosmology
• G-Bounce
• Higgs inflation at the critical point
• The Null Energy Condition and its violation
• Scalar fields, energy conditions, and traversable wormholes
• A smooth bouncing cosmology with scale invariant spectrum
• Traversable wormholes from massless conformally coupled scalar fields
• Energy conditions and their cosmological implications
• A Cosmological Super-Bounce
• Cosmological Perturbations Through a Non-Singular Ghost-Condensate/Galileon Bounce
• Oscillating bounce solutions and vacuum tunneling in de Sitter spacetime
• From Satisfying to Violating the Null Energy Condition
• High frequency oscillations of Newton's constant induced by inflation
• The false vacuum bubble nucleation due to a nonminimally coupled scalar field
• The number of negative modes of the oscillating bounces
• The vacuum bubbles in de Sitter background and black hole pair creation
• Negative Modes of Oscillating Instantons
• Oscillating instanton solutions in curved space
• Zoology of instanton solutions in flat potential barriers
• 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

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Modified Gravity Theories on a Nutshell: Inflation, Bounce and Late-time Evolution
• From the Flamm-Einstein-Rosen bridge to the modern renaissance of traversable wormholes
• Traversable Wormhole in Einstein 3-Form Theory With Self-Interacting Potential
• The fate of Schwarzschild-de Sitter Black Holes in $f(R)$ gravity
• Towards a Solution of the Negative Mode Problem in Quantum Tunnelling with Gravity
• Regular Instantons in the Eddington-inspired-Born-Infeld Gravity: Lorentzian Wormholes from Bubble Nucleations
• Quantum Gravity Wormholes and Topological Teleporter
• Wormholes and Teleporters
• Wormhole Nucleation via Topological Surgery in Lorentzian Geometry