Coleman-de Luccia tunneling and the Gibbons-Hawking temperature

DOI10.1142/S0217751X10047981zbMATH Open1189.83115arXiv0811.3753OpenAlexW1968824686MaRDI QIDQ3570702FDOQ3570702

Authors: S.-H. Henry Tye, Daniel Wohns, Yang Zhang 

Publication date: 28 June 2010

Published in: International Journal of Modern Physics A (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: 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.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0811.3753

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zbMATH Keywords

early universeGibbons-Hawking temperatureColeman-de Luccia tunneling

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Methods of quantum field theory in general relativity and gravitational theory (83C47) Relativistic cosmology (83F05)

Cites Work

• De Sitter vacua in string theory
• The no-negative mode theorem in false vacuum decay with gravity
• THE GLOBAL STRUCTURE OF THE INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE
• Hawking-Moss bounces and vacuum decay rates

Cited In (8)

• HAWKING TEMPERATURE OF DILATON BLACK HOLES FROM TUNNELING
• Hawking temperatures of Myers–Perry black holes from tunneling
• Convexity, gauge-dependence and tunneling rates
• Black holes as bubbles of AdS
• RAPID TUNNELING AND PERCOLATION IN THE LANDSCAPE
• Tunneling potentials for the tunneling action: gauge invariance
• Understanding thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime via inter-detector interaction
• Entropic interpretation of the Hawking-Moss bounce

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