Remote Hawking-Moss instanton and the Lorentzian path integral

TL;DR

This paper investigates the quantum tunneling effects on the Hawking-Moss instanton in de Sitter space, demonstrating that remote transitions are suppressed compared to conventional estimates using Lorentzian path integrals and Picard-Lefschetz theory.

Contribution

It introduces a Lorentzian path integral approach to accurately evaluate remote Hawking-Moss transitions, revealing suppression effects not captured by traditional methods.

Findings

Quantum tunneling reduces transition amplitudes for distant vacua.

Lorentzian path integral provides a more reliable estimate than conventional HM amplitude.

Transition suppression increases with larger field separation ||.

Abstract

The Hawking-Moss (HM) bounce solution implies that the tunneling amplitude between vacua is uniquely determined by the vacuum energy at the initial vacuum and the top of a potential barrier, regardless of the field distance between them $\Delta \phi$. This implausible conclusion was carefully discussed in [E. J. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 251303, (2007)], and it was concluded that the conventional HM amplitude is not reliable for a transition to the top of distant local maxima (hereinafter referred to as the remote HM transition). We revisit this issue and study the impact of the quantum tunneling effect on the remote HM transition. We demonstrate that the amplitude for such a distant transition is indeed smaller than the conventional HM amplitude by employing the Lorentzian path integral in a simple setup. We consider a linear potential, which allows for analytic treatments, and evaluate the up-tunneling probability of a homogeneous scalar field in de Sitter spacetime. The Picard-Lefschetz theory is employed to identify the relevant Lefschetz thimble, representing the relevant tunneling trajectory. We then compare the resulting transition amplitude with the conventional HM amplitude. We find that when the field separation $|\Delta \phi|$ is larger, the quantum-tunneling amplitude, estimated by our Lorentzian path integral, is smaller than that of the conventional HM amplitude. This implies that the transition amplitude may be significantly suppressed if the thermal interpretation is not applicable and the quantum-tunneling effect is dominant for the remote HM transition.