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Birth of inflationary universes via wineglass wormholes and their no-boundary relatives

George Lavrelashvili1,* and Jean-Luc Lehners2,†

  • *Contact author: george.lavrelashvili@tsu.ge
  • †Contact author: jlehners@aei.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 046009 – Published 10 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jpwp-2nzv

Abstract

We study Euclidean wineglass wormholes, which mediate the nucleation of inflationary spacetimes from an existing spacetime with asymptotically flat or anti–de Sitter regions. These wormholes are distinguished by the presence of a local maximum of the scale factor, which allows the analytically continued Lorentzian spacetime to expand after materialization. We present explicit numerical wormhole solutions supported either by an axionic field or a magnetic gauge field, in both cases in conjunction with a self-interacting scalar field. More exotic solutions, with multiple extrema of the scale factor, are also described. As we discovered recently, in the limit of small axionic or magnetic charge, wineglass wormhole solutions split into two separate geometries, one being the background spacetime and the other a disconnected no-boundary instanton. We study the associated topology changing transition in detail and provide an extensive discussion of both the properties and puzzles exhibited by this common family of wineglass/no-boundary instantons.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 046009– Published 10 August, 2026
  • Received 20 May 2026
  • Accepted 20 July 2026
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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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