Related papers: Emergently Thermalized Islands in the Landscape
Under the assumption that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
A continuous process of creation of particles is investigated as a possible connection between the inflationary stage with late cosmic acceleration. In this model, the inflationary era occurs due to a continuous and fast process of creation…
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
We establish an analytical criterion for dynamical thermalization within harmonic systems, applicable to both classical and quantum models. Specifically, we prove that thermalization of various observables, such as particle energies in…
In recent literature on eternal inflation, a number of measures have been introduced which attempt to assign probabilities to different pocket universes by counting the number of each type of pocket according to a specific procedure. We…
Current measurements of Standard Model parameters suggest that the electroweak vacuum is metastable. This metastability has important cosmological implications, because large fluctuations in the Higgs field could trigger vacuum decay in the…
The electromigration-induced shape evolution of two-dimensional vacancy islands on a crystal surface is studied using a continuum approach. We consider the regime where mass transport is restricted to terrace diffusion in the interior of…
Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…
It has recently been realized that many theories of physics beyond the Standard Model give rise to cosmological histories exhibiting extended epochs of cosmological stasis. During such epochs, the abundances of different energy components…
The evolution of surface gravity waves is driven by nonlinear interactions that trigger an energy cascade similarly to the one observed in hydrodynamic turbulence. This process, known as wave turbulence, has been found to display anomalous…
We calculate the full spectrum, as observed today, of the cosmological gravitational waves generated within a model based on loop quantum cosmology. It is assumed that the universe, after the transition to the classical regime, undergoes a…
This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
We suggest that spontaneous eternal inflation can provide a natural explanation for the thermodynamic arrow of time, and discuss the underlying assumptions and consequences of this view. In the absence of inflation, we argue that systems…
Quantum field theory is constructed upon the assumption of stabilities of the vacuum and of the one-particle state. For finite temperature, the one-particle state becomes unstable because of thermal fluctuations, whereas the thermal vacuum…
Since inflationary perturbations must generically couple to all degrees of freedom present in the early Universe, it is more realistic to view these fluctuations as an open quantum system interacting with an environment. Then, on very…
Studies of non-equilibrium dynamics of cosmological phase transitions may involve a scalar field interacting weakly with the energy-momentum tensor of a thermal plasma. At late times, when the scalar field is approaching equilibrium, it…
Concepts like `typicality' and the `eigenstate thermalization hypothesis' aim at explaining the apparent equilibration of quantum systems, possibly after a very long time. However, these concepts are not concerned with the specific way in…
A strongly non-integrable system is expected to satisfy the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which states that the expectation value of an observable in an energy eigenstate is the same as the thermal value. This must be revised if the…
We investigate the thermodynamics of integrable classical field theories under the effect of a random initial configuration, motivated by the nonequilibrium evolution of quantum field theories. The approach to thermal equilibrium is…