Static oscillating bounces in Schwarzschild de Sitter spacetime are investigated. The oscillating bounce with many oscillations gives a super-thick bubble wall, for which the total vacuum energy increases while the mass of the black hole decreases due to the conservation of Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) mass. We show that the transition rate of such an "up-tunneling" consuming the seed black hole is higher than that of the Hawking-Moss transition. The correspondence of analyses in the static and global coordinates in the Euclidean de Sitter space is also investigated.
We revisit the derivation of the Hawking-Moss transition rate. Using the static coordinates, we show that the Euclidean action is entirely determined by the contribution of the entropy of de Sitter space which is proportional to the surface area of the horizon. This holographic feature is common to any static spacetime with a horizon on which the shift vector vanishes.
We extend the the concept of Hawking-Moss, or up-tunnelling, transitions in the early universe to include black hole seeds. The black hole greatly enhances the decay amplitude, however, order to have physically consistent results, we need to impose a new condition (automatically satisfied for the original Hawking-Moss instanton) that the cosmological horizon area should not increase during tunnelling. We motivate this conjecture physically in two ways. First, we look at the energetics of the process, using the formalism of extended black hole thermodynamics; secondly, we extend the stochastic …
The conventional interpretation of the Hawking-Moss (HM) solution implies a transition rate between vacua that depends only on the values of the potential in the initial vacuum and at the top of a potential barrier, leading to the implausible conclusion that transitions to distant vacua can be as likely as those to a nearby one. I analyze this issue using a nongravitational example with analogous properties. I show that such HM bounce do not give reliable rate calculations, but are instead related to the probability of finding a quasistable configuration at a local potential maximum.
The Hawking-Moss tunneling rate for a field described by the Dirac-Born-Infeld action is calculated using a stochastic approach. We find that the effect of the non-trivial kinetic term is to enhance the tunneling rate, which can be exponentially significant. This result should be compared to the DBI enhancement found in the Coleman-de Luccia case.
The quantum behavior of noncommutative eternal inflation is quite different from the usual knowledge. Unlike the usual eternal inflation, the quantum fluctuation of noncommutative eternal inflation is suppressed by the Hubble parameter. Due to this, we need to reconsider many conceptions of eternal inflation. In this paper we study the Hawking-Moss tunneling in noncommutative eternal inflation using the stochastic approach. We obtain a brand-new form of the tunneling probability for this process and find that the Hawking-Moss tunneling is more unlikely to take place in the noncommutative case …
As a first step toward understanding a lanscape of vacua in a theory of non-linear massive gravity, we consider a landscape of a single scalar field and study tunneling between a pair of adjacent vacua. We study the Hawking-Moss (HM) instanton that sits at a local maximum of the potential, and evaluate the dependence of the tunneling rate on the parameters of the theory. It is found that provided with the same physical HM Hubble parameter $H_{HM}$, depending on the values of parameters $α_3$ and $α_4$ in the action, the corresponding tunneling rate can be either enhanced or suppressed when com…
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 possibilit…
We investigate Euclidean wormholes in Einstein gravity with a massless scalar field in de Sitter space. Euclidean wormholes are possible due to the analytic continuation of the time as well as complexification of fields, where we need to impose the classicality after the Wick-rotation to the Lorentzian signatures. For some parameters, wormholes are preferred than Hawking-Moss instantons, and hence wormholes can be more fundamental than Hawking-Moss type instantons. Euclidean wormholes can be interpreted in three ways: (1) classical big bounce, (2) either tunneling from a small to a large unive…
In this paper, we study Einstein gravity with a minimally coupled scalar field accompanied with a potential, assuming an O(4) symmetric metric ansatz. We call an Euclidean instanton is to be an oscillating instanton, if there exists a point where the derivative of the scale factor and the scalar field vanish at the same time. Then we can prove that the oscillating instanton can be analytically continued, both as inhomogeneous and homogeneous tunneling channels. Here, we especially focus on the possibility of a homogeneous tunneling channel. For the existence of such an instanton, we have to as…
We investigate the decay rate of a false vacuum state in de Sitter space at high Hubble rates, using two methods: the Hawking-Moss instanton method which is fully quantum mechanical but relies on the saddle-point approximation, and the Starobinsky-Yokoyama stochastic approach which is non-perturbative but does not include quantum effects. We use the flux-over-population method to compute the Hawking-Moss decay rate at one-loop order, and demonstrate that in its domain of validity, it is reproduced by the stochastic calculation using the one-loop constraint effective potential. This suggests th…
We present exact Coleman-de Luccia (CdL) instantons, which describe vacuum decay from Anti de Sitter (AdS) space, de Sitter (dS) space and Minkowski space to AdS space. We systematically obtain these exact solutions by considering deformation of Hawking-Moss (HM) instantons. We analytically calculate decay rates and discuss a subtlety in the interpretation.
We study the propagation of null rays and massless fields in a black hole fluctuating geometry. The metric fluctuations are induced by a small oscillating incoming flux of energy. The flux also induces black hole mass oscillations around its average value. We assume that the metric fluctuations are described by a statistical ensemble. The stochastic variables are the phases and the amplitudes of Fourier modes of the fluctuations. By averaging over these variables, we obtain an effective propagation for massless fields which is characterized by a critical length defined by the amplitude of the …
We study homogeneous gravitational instantons, conventionally called the Hawking-Moss (HM) instantons, in bigravity theory. The HM instantons describe the amplitude of quantum tunneling from a false vacuum to the true vacuum. Corrections to General Relativity (GR) are found in a closed form. Using the result, we discuss the following two issues: reduction to the de Rham-Gabadadze-Tolley (dRGT) massive gravity and the possibility of preference for a large $e$-folding number in the context of the Hartle-Hawking (HH) no-boundary proposal. In particular, concerning the dRGT limit, it is found that…
We study the process of relaxation back to thermal equilibrium in $(1+1)$-dimensional conformal field theory at finite temperature. When the size of the system is much larger than the inverse temperature, perturbations decay exponentially with time. On the other hand, when the inverse temperature is large, the relaxation is oscillatory with characteristic period set by the size of the system. We then analyse the intermediate regime in two specific models, namely free fermions, and a strongly coupled large $\tt k$ conformal field theory which is dual to string theory on $(2+1)$-dimensional anti…
We study the emergence of de Sitter space in Euclidean dynamical triangulations (EDT). Working within the semi-classical approximation, it is possible to relate the lattice parameters entering the simulations to the partition function of Euclidean quantum gravity. We verify that the EDT geometries behave semi-classically, and by making contact with the Hawking-Moss instanton solution for the Euclidean partition function, we show how to extract a value of the renormalized Newton's constant from the simulations. This value is consistent with that of our previous determination coming from the int…
We derive the rate for transitions between de Sitter vacua by treating the field theory on the static patch as a thermal system. This reproduces the Coleman-De Luccia formalism for calculating the rate, but leads to a modified interpretation of the bounce solution and a different prediction for the evolution of the system after tunneling. The bounce is seen to correspond to a sequence of configurations interpolating between initial and final configurations on either side of the tunneling barrier, all of which are restricted to the static patch. The final configuration, which gives the initial …
Black holes pose a serious problem in the cyclic or oscillating cosmology. It is speculated that, in the cyclic universe with phantom turnarounds, black holes will be torn apart by the phantom energy before turnaround before they can create any problems. In this paper, using the mechanism of the phantom accretion onto black holes, we find that black holes do not disappear before the phantom turnaround. But the remanent black holes will not cause any problems due to the Hawking evaporation.
We provide an explicitly hermitian hamiltonian description for the spontaneous radiation of black holes, which is a many-level, multiple-degeneracy generalization of the usual Janeys-Cummings model for two-level atoms. By standard Wigner-Wiesskopf approximation, we show that for the first one or few particles' radiation our model yields completely the same power spectrum as hawking radiation requires. While in the many-particle radiation cases, numeric methods allow us to follow the evolution of microscopic state of a black hole exactly, from which we can get the firstly increasing then decrea…
We study the index of 4d $\mathcal{N}=4$ Yang-Mills theory with $U(N)$ gauge group, focussing on the physics of the dual BPS black holes in $AdS_5\times S^5$. Certain aspects of these black holes can be studied from finite $N$ indices with reasonably large $N^2$. We make numerical studies of the index for $N\leq 6$, by expanding it up to reasonably high orders in the fugacity. The entropy of the index agrees very well with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the dual black holes, say at $N^2=25$ or $36$. Our data clarifies and supports the recent ideas which allowed analytic studies of these bla…
In this paper we first give arguments supporting the idea that a B.T.Z black hole can face a transplankian problem even when its mass is small. K.M.M quantum theory is applied to the Hawking evaporation of the Schwarzchild and B.T.Z black holes. Working in the physically safe quasi position representation, we argue that the oscillating term present in a previous analysis is removed so that actually one doesn't need an average procedure. We expand the s wave function as the exponential of a series in the minimal length of the new quantum theory. This reduces an infinite order differential equat…
