We consider a wave-function approach to the false vacuum decay with gravity and present a new method to calculate the tunneling amplitude under the WKB approximation. The result agrees with the one obtained by the Euclidean path-integral method, but gives a much clearer interpretation of an instanton (Euclidean bounce solution) that dominates the path integral. In particular, our method is fully capable of dealing with the case of a thick wall with the radius of the bubble comparable to the radius of the instanton, thus surpassing the path-integral method whose use can be justified only in the thin-wall and small bubble radius limit. The calculation is done by matching two WKB wave functions, one with the final state and another with the initial state, with the wave function in the region where the scale factor of the metric is sufficiently small compared with the inverse of the typical energy scale of the field potential at the tunneling. The relation of the boundary condition on our wave function for the false vacuum decay with the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary boundary condition and Vilenkin’s tunneling boundary condition on the wave function of the universe is also discussed.

• Received 23 December 1999

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.61.103508