Transitions Between de Sitter Minima

Abstract

We investigate the cosmological signatures of instantons mediating tunneling between de Sitter minima. For generic potentials the Coleman-de Luccia instanton does not necessarily exist; when it does not, the instanton which contributes to the decay rate is the trivial constant solution, known as the Hawking-Moss instanton. With the aid of a toy model we interpret this solution and describe the resulting cosmology. In neither the Coleman-de Luccia nor Hawking-Moss case can the resulting cosmology be closed. An observation of significant positive curvature would therefore rule out the possibility that our universe arose from any transition from a neighboring minimum in the string-theory landscape.

19 pages, 3 figures; references added, typos corrected

References in corpus (19)

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• A status report on the observability of cosmic bubble collisions
• Dynamical compactification from de Sitter space
• Watching Worlds Collide: Effects on the CMB from Cosmological Bubble Collisions
• Cosmic Bubble Collisions
• Stochastic Inflation Revisited: Non-Slow Roll Statistics and DBI Inflation
• Creation of an inflationary universe out of a black hole
• Field dynamics and tunneling in a flux landscape
• Schwinger pair production at nonzero temperatures or in compact directions
• Dynamics of false vacuum bubbles with nonminimal coupling
• Standard Model vacuum decay in a de Sitter Background
• The Case of the Disappearing Instanton
• Bubble, Bubble, Flow and Hubble: Large Scale Galaxy Flow from Cosmological Bubble Collisions
• Axion Landscape Cosmology
• Out of equilibrium: understanding cosmological evolution to lower-entropy states
• de Sitter Decays to Infinity
• Coleman-de Luccia Tunneling and the Gibbons-Hawking Temperature
• On the Limits of Effective Quantum Field Theory: Eternal Inflation, Landscapes, and Other Mythical Beasts
• Instability of De Sitter Spacetime induced by Quantum Conformal Anomaly
• Exactly Solvable Vacuum Decays with Gravity
• Coleman-de Luccia instanton in dRGT massive gravity
• Stochastic tunneling for strongly non-Gaussian inflationary theories
• Initial Conditions for Bubble Universes
• Flux Compactifications on $(S_2{)}^N$
• Island Cosmology in the Landscape
• Effects of the cosmological expansion on the bubble nucleation rate for relativistic first-order phase transitions
• Positive curvature and scalar field tunneling in the landscape
• Flux Compactifications Grow Lumps
• Localization on the Landscape and Eternal Inflation
• Topics in vacuum decay (Ph.D Thesis)
• Instanton interaction in de Sitter spacetime