Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 95, Issue 10, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.95.103508
Keywords
-
Funding
- Government of Canada through Industry Canada
- Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research and Innovation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We argue that the Lorentzian path integral is a better starting point for quantum cosmology than its Euclidean counterpart. In particular, we revisit the minisuperspace calculation of the Feynman path integral for quantum gravity with a positive cosmological constant. Instead of rotating to Euclidean time, we deform the contour of integration over metrics into the complex plane, exploiting Picard-Lefschetz theory to transform the path integral from a conditionally convergent integral into an absolutely convergent one. We show that this procedure unambiguously determines which semiclassical saddle point solutions are relevant to the quantum mechanical amplitude. Imposing no-boundary initial conditions, i.e., restricting attention to regular, complex metrics with no initial boundary, we find that the dominant saddle contributes a semiclassical exponential factor which is precisely the inverse of the famous Hartle-Hawking result.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available