Solitons as Key Parts to Produce a Universe in the Laboratory

TL;DR

This paper explores theoretical models for creating a universe in the laboratory using solitons and quantum tunnelling, aiming to understand the fundamental physics of universe formation.

Contribution

It reviews classical and quantum models for laboratory universe creation, highlighting potential extensions, open issues, and implications for testing fundamental physics principles.

Findings

Classical soliton collision models can generate inflationary domains.

Quantum tunnelling models suggest possible universe creation via instantons.

Open issues include detectability of child universes and tunnelling process properties.

Abstract

Cosmology is usually understood as an observational science, where experimentation plays no role. It is interesting, nevertheless, to change this perspective addressing the following question: what should we do to create a universe, in a laboratory? It appears, in fact, that this is, in principle, possible according to at least two different paradigms; both allow to circumvent singularity theorems, i.e. the necessity of singularities in the past of inflating domains which have the required properties to generate a universe similar to ours. The first of them is substantially classical, and is built up considering solitons which collide with surrounding topological defects, generating an inflationary domain of space-time. The second is, instead, partly quantum and considers the possibility of tunnelling of past-non-singular regions of spacetime into an inflating universe, following a well-known instanton proposal. We are, here, going to review some of these models, as well as highlight possible extensions, generalizations and the open issues (as for instance the detectability of child universes and the properties of quantum tunnelling processes) that still affect the description of their dynamics. In doing so we will remark how the works on this subject can represent virtual laboratories to test the role that fundamental principles of physics (particularly, the interplay of quantum and general relativistic realms) played in the formation of our universe.