Note on KSW-allowability of Wine-Glass Geometry

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ailiga, Manishankar, Narain, Gaurav
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912987375206400
author Ailiga, Manishankar
Narain, Gaurav
author_facet Ailiga, Manishankar
Narain, Gaurav
contents In this note we consider no-boundary instantons and wine-glass geometries which are of interest in the context of quantum cosmology. While the former usually appears as a dominant saddle in the path-integral, the wineglass geometry can become dominant saddle in some situations. The later has been argued to have a longer inflationary phase of the Universe. Kontsevich-Segal-Witten (KSW)-allowability criterion which classifies geometries on the basis of the requirement of having a meaningful QFT on it, pushes one to analyse the allowability of the various geometries. In this note we do a simple study to seek answer to the allowabilty of no-boundary instantons and wine-glass geometries, where the later is obtained via analytical continuation of Lorentzian deSitter in pure gravity. Our simple analysis which make use of a milder version of KSW allowability criterion shows that no-boundary instanton is KSW allowed while wine-glass geometries obtained via such analytic continuation in pure-gravity are KSW disallowed. This study however doesn't covers wineglass saddles arising in gravity coupled with matter theories.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_23457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Note on KSW-allowability of Wine-Glass Geometry
Ailiga, Manishankar
Narain, Gaurav
High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
In this note we consider no-boundary instantons and wine-glass geometries which are of interest in the context of quantum cosmology. While the former usually appears as a dominant saddle in the path-integral, the wineglass geometry can become dominant saddle in some situations. The later has been argued to have a longer inflationary phase of the Universe. Kontsevich-Segal-Witten (KSW)-allowability criterion which classifies geometries on the basis of the requirement of having a meaningful QFT on it, pushes one to analyse the allowability of the various geometries. In this note we do a simple study to seek answer to the allowabilty of no-boundary instantons and wine-glass geometries, where the later is obtained via analytical continuation of Lorentzian deSitter in pure gravity. Our simple analysis which make use of a milder version of KSW allowability criterion shows that no-boundary instanton is KSW allowed while wine-glass geometries obtained via such analytic continuation in pure-gravity are KSW disallowed. This study however doesn't covers wineglass saddles arising in gravity coupled with matter theories.
title Note on KSW-allowability of Wine-Glass Geometry
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23457