A menagerie of wormholes and cosmologies in the gravitational path integral
Abstract
A bstract We analyse a variety of Euclidean saddles in the gravitational path integral, with asymptotic AdS boundary conditions, in a class of Einstein-Scalar-Maxwell models. These include single boundary solutions, usual and wineglass wormholes, as well as more exotic (quasi)-oscillatory saddles. Our construction shows how an unbound number of oscillations gets tamed, when flat directions of the potential get lifted. We find several interesting phase transitions between these solutions. The Euclidean wormhole backgrounds can be analytically continued to Lorentzian FLRW universes. Some of them contain an early period of inflation. We delineate the conditions under which they can be the dominant saddles in the gravitational path integral and use them to estimate ratios of probabilities for different cosmological outcomes.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Cosmology and Gravitation Theories
Black Holes and Theoretical Physics
Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Journal of High Energy Physics
- Publisher
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC
- Volume
- 2026
- Issue
- 6
- Publication date
- 16 June 2026
- Language
- EN