Quantum nucleation of false-vacuum bubbles

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We show that a small bubble of false vacuum can tunnel to the critical size for inflation, and calculate the amplitude in leading WKB approximation. An initially nonsingular space becomes and exterior space plus a baby universe (which contains the bubble), joined by a black-hole singularity. We work in a Hamiltonian formalism; the corresponding Euclidean bounce is shown to have a degenerate vierbein.