Coleman-Weinberg symmetry breaking in a rotating spacetime

We analyse the effective potential of a massless scalar field in a Goedel spacetime as a model for investigating the symmetry breaking processes usually leading to inflationary cosmologies in the presence of a primordial cosmological rotation. We use the partially summed Jack-Parker expression for the DeWitt-Schwinger expansion of the effective action, and find that symmetry is restored by rotation if the curvature coupling constant ξ is negative, and broken if positive. This latter result being independent of the value of the rotation. (author)