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

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