Bubble Nucleation Rate In Fourth-Order Gravity

Abstract

We calculate the bubble nucleation rate in a fourth-order gravity theory whose action contains an $R^2$ term, under the thin-wall approximation, by two different methods. First the bounce solution is found for the Euclidean version of the original action. Next, we use a conformal transformation to transform the theory into general relativity with an additional scalar field and then proceed to find the bounce solution. The same results are obtained from both calculations.

Comments: 20 pages. TeX with phyzzx macro