Hawking-Moss transition with a black hole seed

TL;DR

This paper explores how primordial black holes influence Hawking-Moss transitions in the early universe, proposing a new condition on horizon area change to ensure physically consistent decay processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extension of Hawking-Moss transitions incorporating black hole seeds and proposes a new area-increase condition supported by thermodynamics and stochastic inflation.

Findings

Black holes significantly enhance decay amplitudes.

A new condition on horizon area change is necessary for consistency.

Physical motivation is provided via thermodynamics and stochastic inflation.

Abstract

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 inflationary formalism to include primordial black holes. Both of these methods give a physical substantiation of our conjecture.