Birth of the Universe as anti-tunnelling from the string perturbative vacuum

The decay of the string perturbative vacuum, if triggered by a suitable, duality-breaking dilaton potential, can efficiently proceed via the parametric amplification of the Wheeler-De Witt wave function in superspace, and can appropriately describe the birth of our Universe as a quantum process of pair production from the vacuum. --------------------------------------------- Essay written for the 2000 Awards of the Gravity Research Foundation, and selected for Honorable Mention. To appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys. D Typeset using REVT E X 1 A consistent and quantitative description of the birth of our Universe is one of the main goals of the quantum approach to cosmology. In the context of the standard scenario, in particular, quantum effects are expected to stimulate the birth of the Universe in a state approaching the de Sitter geometric configuration, appropriate to inflation [1]. The initial cosmological state is unknown, however, and has to be fixed through some "ad-hoc" pre..