Particle creation in a tunneling universe. I

Abstract

An expanding closed universe filled with radiation can either recollapse or tunnel to the regime of unbounded expansion, if the cosmological constant is nonzero. We re-examine the question of particle creation during tunneling, with the purpose of resolving a long-standing controversy. Using a perturbative superspace model with a conformally coupled massless scalar field, which is known to give no particle production, we explicitly show that the breakdown of the semiclassical approximation and the ``catastrophic particle production`` claimed earlier in the literature are due to an inappropriate choice of the initial quantum state prior to the tunneling.