2005/12/31 by Anthony Aguirre, Matthew C. Johnson · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.73.123529
published as Phys.Rev. D73 (2006) 123529 · 16 PRD-style pages, 13 figures. PRD, in press. Revised to match published version
arxiv created 2006/06/15 · openalex publication_date 2006/06/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the formation via tunneling of inflating (false-vacuum) bubbles in a true-vacuum background, and the reverse process. Using effective potentials from the junction condition formalism, all true- and false-vacuum bubble solutions with positive interior and exterior cosmological constant, and arbitrary mass are catalogued. We find that tunneling through the same effective potential appears to describe two distinct processes: one in which the initial and final states are separated by a wormhole (the Farhi-Guth-Guven mechanism), and one in which they are either in the same hubble volume or separated by a cosmological horizon. In the zero-mass limit, the first process corresponds to the creation of an inhomogenous universe from nothing, while the second mechanism is equivalent to the nucleation of true- or false-vacuum Coleman-De Luccia bubbles. We compute the probabilities of both mechanisms in the WKB approximation using semiclassical Hamiltonian methods, and find that---assuming both process are allowed---neither mechanism dominates in all regimes.