The tunneling hamiltonian representation of false vacuum decay: III. Application to nucleation of an inflationary universe

TL;DR

This paper extends the tunneling Hamiltonian approach to model false vacuum decay and nucleation of an inflationary universe, incorporating wavefunctionals of scalar fields and particle-antiparticle pairs to describe the phase transition.

Contribution

It generalizes the tunneling Hamiltonian method to inflationary universe nucleation using wavefunctionals and particle-antiparticle pairs, providing a novel framework for false vacuum decay.

Findings

Model satisfies flat slow roll condition

Describes nucleation via particle-antiparticle pairs

Generalizes tunneling Hamiltonian to cosmological phase transitions

Abstract

The tunneling hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wave functions. Here we apply a generalization of a way we formed appropriate wave functionals in CDW to how to present nucleation of an inflationary universe . This allows us to make a generalization of the model used for inflation when the inflaton is trapped in a false vacuum and, after tunneling, makes a first order phase transition to initiate nucleation of an inflationary universe, in which tunneling between states which are wavefunctionals of a scalar quantum field are considered . We explain how we can have particle - anti particle pairs as a model for how nucleation occurs and construct a potential which satisfies the flat slow roll condition even while using a modified false vacuum construction to this problem