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Gravitational constrained instantons

Jordan Cotler1,* and Kristan Jensen2,3,†

  • 1Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2Department of Physics & Astronomy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California 94132, USA
  • 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 3P6, Canada

  • *jcotler@fas.harvard.edu
  • †kristanj@uvic.ca
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Phys. Rev. D 104, L081501 – Published 5 October, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.L081501

Abstract

We find constrained instantons in Einstein gravity with and without a cosmological constant. These configurations are not saddle points of the Einstein-Hilbert action, yet they contribute to nonperturbative processes in quantum gravity. In some cases we expect that they give the dominant contribution from spacetimes with certain fixed topologies. With negative cosmological constant, these metrics describe wormholes connecting two asymptotic regions. We find many examples of such wormhole metrics and for certain symmetric configurations establish their perturbative stability. We expect that the Euclidean versions of these wormholes encode the energy level statistics of anti–de Sitter black hole microstates. In the de Sitter and flat space settings we find new homogeneous and isotropic bounce and big bang/crunch cosmologies.

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Phys. Rev. D 104, L081501– Published 5 October, 2021
  • Received 28 October 2020
  • Accepted 18 August 2021
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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