A criterion for bubble formation in de Sitter universe

Abstract

The influence of the shape of scalar field potential on the outcome of vacuum decay in de Sitter universe is studied. Sufficient condition for vacuum decay via bubble formation, described by Coleman - de Luccia instanton, is revisited and necessary condition is found. Both conditions require that the curvature of the potential is greater than 4 $\times$ (Hubble constant)${}^2$, but while the sufficient condition states that this inequality is to be valid at the top of the barrier, the necessary condition requires that it holds at least somewhere throughout the barrier. The conditions leave a 'grey zone' in parameter space, which however seems to be forbidden for quartic potential as well as for quadratic potential with a narrow peak proposed by Linde in the context of open inflation.

14 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (1)

• A Toy Model for Open Inflation

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Oscillating bounce solutions and vacuum tunneling in de Sitter spacetime
• Cosmological Aspects of Higgs Vacuum Metastability
• The 1-loop effective potential for the Standard Model in curved spacetime
• Transitions Between de Sitter Minima
• Fluctuations about Cosmological Instantons
• Inflation near a metastable de Sitter vacuum from moduli stabilisation
• False vacuum decay in a brane world cosmological model
• Standard Model vacuum decay in a de Sitter Background
• Euclidean action for vacuum decay in a de Sitter universe
• Zoology of instanton solutions in flat potential barriers
• Exactly Solvable Vacuum Decays with Gravity
• Effects of the cosmological expansion on the bubble nucleation rate for relativistic first-order phase transitions
• An application of the renormalization group to the calculation of the vacuum decay rate in flat and curved space-time
• False vacuum decay with gravity in a critical case
• Thin-wall vacuum decay in the presence of a compact dimension
• Coleman - de Luccia instanton of the second order in a brane world
• Study of the Coleman - de Luccia instanton of the second order