Hawking-Moss transition with a black hole seed

Understand

We extend the the concept of Hawking-Moss, or up-tunnelling, transitions in the early universe to include black hole seeds.

• The black hole greatly enhances the decay amplitude, however, order to have physically consistent results, we need to impose a new condition (automatically satisfied for the original Hawking-Moss instanton) that the cosmological horizon area should not increase during tunnelling.
• We motivate this conjecture physically in two ways.
• First, we look at the energetics of the process, using the formalism of extended black hole thermodynamics; secondly, we extend the stochastic inflationary formalism to include primordial black holes.