Spontaeneous Symmetry Breaking and Tunneling in de Sitter Space

Abstract

Motivated by our earlier argument that the apparent large cosmological constant from quantum fluctuations is actually an artifact of not using a full quantum mechanical superposition to determine the ground state in which the universe lives in the de Sitter space at the beginning of inflation, we calculate the tunneling probability for the two-well potential for a scalar field in de Sitter space. We include ocupling of the potential to gravity, and the effective potential from quantum corrections. The results show the eigenstates are the sum and differences of the wavefunctions for the seperate wells, i.e. a full superposition, and the energy levels are split, with tunneling between them determined by the Hawking-Moss instanton and not supressed.