8 research outputs found
Homogeneous Modes of Cosmological Instantons
We discuss the O(4) invariant perturbation modes of cosmological instantons.
These modes are spatially homogeneous in Lorentzian spacetime and thus not
relevant to density perturbations. But their properties are important in
establishing the meaning of the Euclidean path integral. If negative modes are
present, the Euclidean path integral is not well defined, but may nevertheless
be useful in an approximate description of the decay of an unstable state. When
gravitational dynamics is included, counting negative modes requires a careful
treatment of the conformal factor problem. We demonstrate that for an
appropriate choice of coordinate on phase space, the second order Euclidean
action is bounded below for normalized perturbations and has a finite number of
negative modes. We prove that there is a negative mode for many gravitational
instantons of the Hawking-Moss or Coleman-De Luccia type, and discuss the
associated spectral flow. We also investigate Hawking-Turok constrained
instantons, which occur in a generic inflationary model. Implementing the
regularization and constraint proposed by Kirklin, Turok and Wiseman, we find
that those instantons leading to substantial inflation do not possess negative
modes. Using an alternate regularization and constraint motivated by reduction
from five dimensions, we find a negative mode is present. These investigations
shed new light on the suitability of Euclidean quantum gravity as a potential
description of our universe.Comment: 16 pages, compressed and RevTex file, including one postscript figure
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Euclidean Wormholes in String Theory
We show that toroidal compactification of type II string theory to six
dimensions admits axionic euclidean wormhole solutions. These wormholes can be
inserted into backgrounds, which have a
well-defined CFT dual. AdS/CFT duality then suggests that the wormhole
solutions cannot be interpreted using parameters as originally
suggested by Coleman.Comment: 18 pages. ver. 2: typos corrected, references adde
Cosmological perturbations in FRW model with scalar field within Hamilton-Jacobi formalism and symplectic projector method
The Hamilton-Jacobi analysis is applied to the dynamics of the scalar
fluctuations about the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW). The gauge conditions
are found from the consistency conditions. The physical degrees of freedom of
the model are obtain by symplectic projector method. The role of the linearly
dependent Hamiltonians and the gauge variables in Hamilton-Jacobi formalism is
discussed.Comment: 11 page
Nonsingular instantons for the creation of open universes
We show that the instability of the singular Vilenkin instanton describing
the creation of an open universe can be avoided using, instead of a minimally
coupled scalar field, an axionic massless scalar field which gives rise to the
Giddings-Strominger instanton. However, if we replace the singularity of the
Hawking Turok instanton for an axionic wormhole some interpretational and
technical difficulties would appear which can be overcome by introducing a
positive cosmological constant in the action. This would make the instanton
finite and free constant in the action. This would make the instanton finite
and free from any instabilities.Comment: 8 pages, RevTex. A new section on the instantonic global structure
and a figure have been added. To appear in Phys. Rev.
Wormholes in AdS
We construct a few Euclidean supergravity solutions with multiple boundaries.
We consider examples where the corresponding boundary field theory is well
defined on each boundary. We point out that these configurations are puzzling
from the AdS/CFT point of view. A proper understanding of the AdS/CFT
dictionary for these cases might yield some information about the physics of
closed universes.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures, harvmac. v2: minor typos corrected and
references adde
Classical Yang-Mills Black hole hair in anti-de Sitter space
The properties of hairy black holes in Einstein–Yang–Mills (EYM) theory are reviewed, focusing on spherically symmetric solutions. In particular, in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space (adS) stable black hole hair is known to exist for frak su(2) EYM. We review recent work in which it is shown that stable hair also exists in frak su(N) EYM for arbitrary N, so that there is no upper limit on how much stable hair a black hole in adS can possess
Nucleation rates in flat and curved space
Nucleation rates for tunneling processes in Minkowski and de Sitter space are investigated, taking into account one loop prefactors. In particular, we consider the creation of membranes by an antisymmetric tensor field, analogous to Schwinger pair production. This can be viewed as a model for the decay of a false (or true) vacuum at zero temperature in the thin wall limit. Also considered is the spontaneous nucleation of strings, domain walls, and monopoles during inflation. The instantons for these processes are spherical world sheets or world lines embedded in flat or de Sitter backgrounds. We find the contribution of such instantons to the semiclassical partition function, including the one loop corrections due to small fluctuations around the spherical world sheet. We suggest a prescription for obtaining, from the partition function, the distribution of objects nucleated during inflation. This can be seen as an extension of the usual formula, valid in flat space, according to which the nucleation rate is twice the imaginary part of the free energy. For the case of pair production, the results reproduce those that can be obtained using second quantization methods, confirming the validity of instanton techniques in de Sitter space. Throughout the paper, both the gravitational field and the antisymmetric tensor field are assumed external