No Arabic abstract
The usual (type A) thin-wall Coleman-de Luccia instanton is made by a bigger-than-half sphere of the false vacuum and a smaller-than-half sphere of the true vacuum. It has a the standard O(4) symmetric negative mode associated with changing the size of false vacuum region. On the other hand, the type B instanton, made by two smaller-than-half spheres, was believed to have lost this negative mode. We argue that such belief is misguided due to an over-restriction on Euclidean path integral. We introduce the idea of a purely geometric junction to visualize why such restriction could be removed, and then explicitly construct this negative mode. We also show that type B and type A instantons have the same thermal interpretation for mediating tunnelings.
Coleman-de Luccia processes for AdS to AdS decays in Einstein-scalar theories are studied. Such tunnelling processes are interpreted as vev-driven holographic RG flows of a quantum field theory on de Sitter space-time. These flows do not exist for generic scalar potentials, which is the holographic formulation of the fact that gravity can act to stabilise false AdS vacua. The existence of Coleman-de Luccia tunnelling solutions in a potential with a false AdS vacuum is found to be tied to the existence of exotic RG flows in the same potential. Such flows are solutions where the flow skips possible fixed points or reverses direction in the coupling. This connection is employed to construct explicit potentials that admit Coleman-de Luccia instantons in AdS and to study the associated tunnelling solutions. Thin-walled instantons are observed to correspond to dual field theories with a parametrically large value of the dimension $Delta$ for the operator dual to the scalar field, casting doubt on the attainability of this regime in holography. From the boundary perspective, maximally symmetric instantons describe the probability of symmetry breaking of the dual QFT in de Sitter. It is argued that, even when such instantons exist, they do not imply an instability of the same theory on flat space or on $Rtimes S^3$.
We study Coleman-de Luccia tunneling in some detail. We show that, for a single scalar field potential with a true and a false vacuum, there are four types of tunneling, depending on the properties of the potential. A general tunneling process involves a combination of thermal (Gibbons-Hawking temperature) fluctuation part way up the barrier followed by quantum tunneling. The thin-wall approximation is a special limit of the case (of only quantum tunneling) where inside the nucleation bubble is the true vacuum while the outside reaches the false vacuum. Hawking-Moss tunneling is the (only thermal fluctuation) limit of the case where the inside of the bubble does not reach the true vacuum at the moment of its creation, and the outside is cut off by the de Sitter horizon before it reaches the false vacuum. We estimate the corrections to the Hawking-Moss formula, which can be large. In all cases, we see that the bounce of the Euclidean action decreases rapidly as the vacuum energy density increases, signaling that the tunneling is not exponentially suppressed. In some sense, this phenomenon may be interpreted as a finite temperature effect due to the Gibbons-Hawking temperature of the de Sitter space. As an application, we discuss the implication of this tunneling property to the cosmic landscape.
We revisit the famous Coleman-de Luccia formalism for decay of false vacuum in gravitational theory. Since the corresponding wave function is time-independent we argue that its instantons interpretation as the decay rate probability is problematic. We instead propose that such phenomenon can better be described by the Wheeler-de Witts wave function. To do so, the Hamilton-Jacobi formalism is employed in the WKB approximation. The scalar and gravitational fields can then be treated as a two-dimensional effective metric. For a particular case of dS-to-dS tunneling, we calculated the wave function and found that it depends only on the potential of the false, and not on the true, vacuum; reminiscent of, though in totally different formalism with, the Hawking-Moss result. In general, this alternative approach might have significant impact on the study of very early universe and quantum cosmology.
We explicitly describe the last stages of black hole evaporation in the context of string theory : the combined study of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) and String Theory (ST) in curved backgrounds allows us to go further in the understanding of quantum gravity effects. The string ``analogue model(or thermo-dynamical approach) is a well suited framework for this purpose.The results also apply to another physically relevant case: de Sitter background. Semiclassical (QFT) and quantum gravity (String) phases or regimes are properly determined (back reaction effects included). The Hawking-Gibbons temperature ${T_H}$ of the semiclassical regime becomes the intrinsic string temperature ${T_S}$ in the quantum gravity regime.The spectrum of black hole evaporation is an incomplete gamma function of $(T_S - T_H)$: the early evaporation is thermal (Hawking radiation), while at the end the black hole undergoes a phase transition to a string state decaying (as string decay) into pure (non mixed) particle states.Remarquably, explicit dynamical computations show that both gravity regimes: semiclassical (QFT) and quantum (string), are dual of each other, in the precise sense of the classical-quantum (de Broglie type) duality.
We provide an exhaustive classification of self-dual four-dimensional gravitational instantons foliated with three-dimensional homogeneous spaces, i.e. homogeneous self-dual metrics on four-dimensional Euclidean spaces admitting a Bianchi simply transitive isometry group. The classification pattern is based on the algebra homomorphisms relating the Bianchi group and the duality group SO(3). New and general solutions are found for Bianchi III.