No-boundary extremal surfaces in slow-roll inflation and other cosmologies

Abstract: Building on previous work on de Sitter extremal surfaces anchored at the future boundary, we study no-boundary extremal surfaces in slow-roll inflation models, with perturbations to no-boundary global $dS$ preserving the spatial isometry. While in pure de Sitter space the Euclidean hemisphere gives a real area equalling half de Sitter entropy, the no-boundary extremal surface areas here have nontrivial real and imaginary pieces overall. We evaluate the area integrals in the complex time-plane defining appropriate contours. For the 4-dim case, the real and imaginary finite corrections at leading order in the slow-roll parameter match those in the semiclassical expansion of the Wavefunction (or action), and corroborate the cosmic brane interpretation discussed previously. We also study no-boundary extremal surfaces in other cosmologies including 3-dimensional inflation and Schwarzschild de Sitter spaces with small mass.