Related papers: Bubbling the False Vacuum Away
A refined version of a recently introduced method for analysing the dynamics of an inhomogeneous irrotational dust universe is presented. A fully non-perturbative numerical computation of the time dependence of volume in this framework…
In this manuscript, we develop a class of inhomogeneous relativistic cosmological models with the following properties: (i) They contain cosmological observers to whom the spatial geometry and the expansion are homogeneous and isotropic;…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. It has been claimed that this leads to a significant…
We study late-time acceleration scenarios using a quintessence field initially trapped in a metastable false vacuum state. The false vacuum has non-zero vacuum energy and could drive exponential expansion if not coupled with gravity. Upon…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
Standard cosmology poses a number of important questions. Apart from its singular origin, it possesses early and late accelerating phases required to account for observations. The vacuum energy has been considered as a possible way to…
We discuss the dynamics of expanding bubble walls in the presence of massive dark photons whose mass changes as they cross the wall. For sufficiently thin walls, we show that there exists a transient kinematic regime characterized by a…
Decaying vacuum models are a class of models that incorporate the vacuum energy density as a time-evolving entity that has the potential to explain the entire evolutionary history of the universe in a single framework. A general solution to…
In his 2005 review, Gravity and the Thermodynamics of Horizons, Paddy suggested that a vacuum in thermal equilibrium with a bath of radiation should have a gradually diminishing energy. We work through the consequences of this scenario, and…
Bubbles of nothing are a class of vacuum decay processes present in some theories with compactified extra dimensions. We investigate the existence and properties of bubbles of nothing in models where the scalar pseudomoduli controlling the…
Homogeneous nucleation of a vapor bubble from a bulk metastable phase is studied here for the first time using the multibody dissipative particle dynamics model. The van der Waals equation of state is used to define a conservative force…
We consider the Skyrme model modified by the addition of mass terms which explicitly break chiral symmetry and pick out a specific point on the model's target space as the unique true vacuum. However, they also allow the possibility of…
Vacuum energy is a simple model for dark energy driving an accelerated expansion of the universe. If the vacuum energy is inhomogeneous in spacetime then it must be interacting. We present the general equations for a spacetime-dependent…
In this paper, we numerically study the impact heavy field degrees of freedom have on vacuum metastability in a toy model, with the aim of better understanding how the decoupling theorem extends to semiclassical processes. We observe that…
We perform three-dimensional numerical relativity simulations of homogeneous and inhomogeneous expanding spacetimes, with a view towards quantifying non-linear effects from cosmological inhomogeneities. We demonstrate fourth-order…
Structure formation models with a cosmological constant are successful in explaining large-scale structure data, but are threatened by the magnitude-redshift relation for Type Ia supernovae. This has led to discussion of models where the…
We point out that the standard formulation of the cosmological constant problem itself is problematic since it is trying to apply the very large scale homogeneous cosmological model to very small (Planck) scale phenomenon. At small scales,…
We present a model for big bang nucleosynthesis which combines baryon inhomogeneities with the effects of the decays of massive particles (masses higher than a few GeV). Those particles, with half-lives longer than the standard…
We consider matter density effects in theories with a false ground state. Large and dense systems, such as stars, can destabilize a metastable minimum and allow for the formation of bubbles of the true minimum. We derive the conditions…
Two-photon decay rates in simple atoms such as hydrogenlike systems represent rather interesting fundamental problems in atomic physics. The sum of the energies of the two emitted photons has to fulfill an energy conservation condition, the…