We study multi-field tunneling using exact solutions for additive potentials. We introduce a binomial potential with non-integer powers that could be considered a generalization of the $4D$ Fubini instanton potential. Using scaling arguments, we show that for multi-field potentials taller and wider barriers may still lead to a smaller bounce action.
We study the evolution of cosmological perturbations in a non-singular bouncing cosmology with a bounce phase which has superimposed oscillations of the scale factor. We identify length scales for which the final spectrum of fluctuations obtains impr
ints of the non-trivial bounce dynamics. These imprints in the spectrum are manifested in the form of damped oscillation features at scales smaller than a characteristic value and an increased reddening of the spectrum at all the scales as the number of small bounces increases.
We have discussed a particular class of exact cosmological solutions of the 4-dimensional low energy string gravity in the string frame. In the vacuum without matter and the 2-form fields, the exact cosmological solutions always give monotonically sh
rinking universes if the dilaton field is not a constant. However, in the presence of the 2-form fields and/or the radiation-like fluid in the string frame, the exact cosmological solutions show a minimum size of the universe in the evolution, but with an initial cosmological curvature singularity in the string frame.
The false vacua of some potentials do not decay via Euclidean bounces. This typically happens for tunneling actions with a flat direction (in field configuration space) that is lifted by a perturbation into a sloping valley, pushing the bounce off to
infinity. Using three different approaches we find a consistent picture for such decays. In the Euclidean approach the bottom of the action valley consists of a family of pseudo-bounces (field configurations with some key good properties of bounces except extremizing the action). The pseudo-bounce result is validated by minimizing a WKB action in Minkowski space along appropriate paths in configuration space. Finally, the simplest approach uses the tunneling action method proposed recently with a simple modification of boundary conditions.
We develop the path integral formalism for studying cosmological perturbations in multi-field inflation, which is particularly well suited to study quantum theories with gauge symmetries such as diffeomorphism invariance. We formulate the gauge fixin
g conditions based on the Poisson brackets of the constraints, from which we derive two convenient gauges that are appropriate for multi-field inflation. We then adopt the in-in formalism to derive the most general expression for the power spectrum of the curvature perturbation including the corrections from the interactions of the curvature mode with other light degrees of freedom. We also discuss the contributions of the interactions to the bispectrum.
We study the consequences of spatial coordinate transformation in multi-field inflation. Among the spontaneously broken de Sitter isometries, only dilatation in the comoving gauge preserves the form of the metric and thus results in quantum-protected
Slavnov-Taylor identities. We derive the corresponding consistency relations between correlation functions of cosmological perturbations in two different ways, by the connected and one-particle-irreducible Greens functions. The lowest-order consistency relations are explicitly given, and we find that even in multi-field inflation the consistency relations in the soft limit are independent of the detail of the matter sector.