2021/12/20 by Naritaka Oshita, Oshita, Naritaka, Yutaro Shoji +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Quantum Mechanics and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.10736
openalex publication_date 2021/12/20 · openalex created_date 2022/05/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We discuss new possible tunneling processes in the presence of gravity. We formulate quantum tunneling using the Wheeler-deWitt canonical quantization and the WKB approximation. The distinctive feature of our formulation is that it accommodates the coexistence of Euclidean and Lorentzian evolution. It opens up a new possibility of quantum tunneling; e.g. a bubble wall itself tunnels the potential barrier pulling the field nearby, where the wall region experiences the Euclidean evolution while the other regions experience the Lorentzian evolution simultaneously. We execute numerical analysis and find that such a process can have a much higher tunneling rate than that of the Coleman-De Luccia bounce. We also find that the new tunneling processes exist even in the decoupling regime of gravity and affect low energy phenomenology.