Impacts of wormholes on false vacuum bubble tunneling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how wormholes influence false vacuum bubble tunneling, showing that wormholes can increase tunneling rates and potentially enable bubbles to connect different universes through quantum tunneling.

Contribution

It extends previous models by incorporating wormhole effects into false vacuum bubble tunneling, deriving an analytical formula, and exploring the impact of wormhole parameters on tunneling rates.

Findings

Wormholes increase the number of instantons and enhance tunneling rates.

Tunneling rate increases with wormhole throat radius, black hole mass, and surface tension.

Bubbles can quantum tunnel into other universes when connected via wormholes.

Abstract

In this study, we generalize the work of Farhi, Guth and Guven [Nucl. Phys. B 339 (1990) 417] to include a wormhole effect. We study the influence of the wormhole on the tunneling of the false vacuum bubble. The spherically symmetric bubble has two domain walls. The classical dynamics of each domain wall are constrained by two classically forbidden regions. We find that the wormhole has increased the number of instantons and thus can enhance the tunneling rate. We have analytically derived the formula for the bubble tunneling rate, which is consistent with the result obtained by Farhi, Guth and Guven when the wormhole disappears. We show that the tunneling rate increases with the throat radius of the wormhole. Furthermore, we illustrate that the tunneling rate increases with an increases in the mass of the black hole or the surface tension. In the case where a wormhole exists within a bubble and is connected to another universe, we demonstrate that the bubble can enter into another universe through quantum tunneling.