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- Title
IN-IN FORMALISM, PSEUDO-INSTANTONS AND RETHINKING QUANTUM COSMOLOGY.
- Authors
KAYA, ALI
- Abstract
Unlike flat space quantum field theories that focus on scattering amplitudes, the main observables in quantum cosmology are correlation functions. The systematic way of calculating correlators is called in-in formalism, which requires only a single asymptotic region, i.e. past infinity. The rules in perturbation theory and the path integral measure are very different for in-in and in-out formalisms, and thus the results which are standard in one approach may not necessarily hold in the other one. We show that stationary phase approximation works completely different for a scalar in-in path integral. Hence, in a cosmological background there are solutions, pseudo-instantons, that allow tunneling between locally stable vacua even in infinite volume, which is counterintuitive from an in-out perspective. We argue that various familiar notions of in-out formalism must be re-examined in the in-in formalism, which might have important consequences for quantum cosmology.
- Subjects
FORMALISM (Architecture); QUANTUM cosmology; QUANTUM field theory; APPROXIMATION theory; METAPHYSICAL cosmology; INSTANTONS
- Publication
International Journal of Modern Physics D: Gravitation, Astrophysics & Cosmology, 2014, Vol 23, Issue 3, p-1
- ISSN
0218-2718
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1142/S0218271814500266