Open inflation and the singular boundary

Abstract

The singularity in Hawking and Turok's model (hep-th/9802030) of open inflation has some appealing properties. We suggest that this singularity should be regularized with matter. The singular instanton can then be obtained as the limit of a family of ``no-boundary'' solutions where both the geometry and the scalar field are regular. Using this procedure, the contribution of the singularity to the Euclidean action is just 1/3 of the Gibbons-Hawking boundary term. Unrelated to this question, we also point out that gravitational backreaction improves the behaviour of scalar perturbations near the singularity. As a result, the problem of quantizing scalar perturbations and gravity waves seems to be very well posed.

7 pages

References in corpus (5)

• Open Inflation Without False Vacua
• Quantum Creation of an Open Inflationary Universe
• Canonical Quantization of Cosmological Perturbations in the One Bubble Open Universe
• Open Inflation, the Four Form and the Cosmological Constant
• Quantum Creation of a Universe with $\Omega \ne 1$: Singular and Non-Singular Instantons

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