Hawking-Moss instanton in nonlinear massive gravity

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Published 19 February 2013 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation Ying-li Zhang et al JCAP02(2013)029 DOI 10.1088/1475-7516/2013/02/029

1475-7516/2013/02/029

Abstract

As a first step toward understanding a lanscape of vacua in a theory of non-linear massive gravity, we consider a landscape of a single scalar field and study tunneling between a pair of adjacent vacua. We study the Hawking-Moss (HM) instanton that sits at a local maximum of the potential, and evaluate the dependence of the tunneling rate on the parameters of the theory. It is found that provided with the same physical HM Hubble parameter HHM, depending on the values of parameters α3 and α4 in the action (2.2), the corresponding tunneling rate can be either enhanced or suppressed when compared to the one in the context of General Relativity (GR). Furthermore, we find the constraint on the ratio of the physical Hubble parameter to the fiducial one, which constrains the form of potential. This result is in sharp contrast to GR where there is no bound on the minimum value of the potential.

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10.1088/1475-7516/2013/02/029