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Title: Initial conditions for R+epsilonR/sup 2/ cosmology

Journal Article · · Phys. Rev. D; (United States)

A pure gravity cosmology based on the R+epsilonR/sup 2/ Lagrangian is known to exhibit inflation for a wide range of initial conditions. In this paper we use the wave function from quantum cosmology to describe this inflation as a chaotic inflationary phase immediately following the quantum creation of the Universe. We evaluate, compare, and discuss the distributions over initial conditions that are fixed by the two boundary-condition proposals of Hartle and Hawking (''no boundary'') and Vilenkin (''tunneling from nothing''). We find that among all classical inflationary trajectories that begin on the classical-quantum boundary, those that lead to an inflation of at least 70 e-foldings make up a fraction of /similar to/exp(-10/sup 12/) in the former case and /similar to/1-exp(-8 x 10/sup 10/) in the latter. Thus, in the simplest interpretation, the observable Universe would be the outcome of a rare event for the first boundary-condition proposal and a typical event for the second.

Research Organization:
Physics Department, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T/vert bar/2A6 and Theoretical Physics Laboratory, The Boris Kidric Institute of Nuclear Sciences, Belgrade, Yugoslavia
OSTI ID:
6192086
Journal Information:
Phys. Rev. D; (United States), Vol. 39:6
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English