Related papers: Metastable Domains of the Landscape
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
The hallmark of superfluidity is the appearance of metastable flow-states that carry a persistent circulating current. Considering Bose-Hubbard superfluid rings, we clarify the role of "quantum chaos" in this context. We show that the…
We consider a general class of disordered mean-field models where both the spin variables and disorder variables take finitely many values. To investigate the size-dependence in the phase-transition regime we construct the metastate…
Composite hadronic states exhibit interesting properties in the presence of very intense magnetic fields, such as those conjectured to exist in the vicinity of certain astrophysical objects. We discuss three scenarios. (i) The presence of…
Bouncing models have been proposed by many authors as a completion, or even as an alternative to inflation for the description of the very early and dense Universe. However, most bouncing models contain a contracting phase from a very large…
We study the compatibility of spontaneous breaking of parity and successful cosmology in a left-right symmetric model where supersymmetry breaking is achieved in metastable vacua. We show that domain walls formed due to this breaking can be…
We show how the state of an unstable particle can be defined in terms of stable asymptotic states. This general definition is used to discuss and to solve some old problems connected with the short-time and large-time behaviour of the…
Systems of stochastic particles evolving in a multi-well energy landscape and attracted to their barycenter is the prototypical example of mean-field process undergoing phase transitions: at low temperature, the corresponding mean-field…
We consider static cosmological solutions along with their stability properties in the framework of a recently proposed theory of massive gravity. We show that the modifcation introduced in the cosmological equations leads to several new…
If the initial quantum state of the universe is a multiverse superposition over many different sets of values of the effective coupling "constants" of physics, and if this quantum state collapses to an eigenstate of the set of coupling…
The presently accelerating universe may keep accelerating forever, eventually run into the event horizon problem, and thus be in conflict with the superstring idea. In the other way around, the current accelerating phase as well as the fate…
In an earlier paper, it is proposed that, due to resonance tunneling effect, tunneling from a large cosmological constant $\Lambda$ site in the stringy comic landscape can be fast, while tunneling from a small $\Lambda$ site may take…
In this paper we study metastable states in single- and two-component dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. We show that this system supports a rich spectrum of symmetries that are remarkably stable despite not being ground states. In a…
The spectrum of stable electrically and magnetically charged supersymmetric particles can change discontinuously as one changes the vacuum on the Coulomb branch of gauge theories with extended supersymmetry in four dimensions. We show that…
It was shown that in robustly transitive, partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms on three dimensional closed manifolds, the strong stable or unstable foliation is minimal. In this article, we prove ``almost all'' leaves of both stable and…
The cosmological constant and the Higgs mass seem unnaturally small and anthropically selected. We show that both can be efficiently scanned in Quantum Field Theories with a large enough number of vacua controllable thanks to approximated…
There are two important examples of physical systems which violate the strong energy condition : Universes (like, it would seem, our own) with a positive cosmological constant, and wormholes. We suggest that a positive cosmological constant…
Oscillons are long-lived, slowly radiating solutions of nonlinear classical relativistic field theories. Recently it was discovered that in one spatial dimension their decay may proceed in "staccato" bursts. Here we perform a systematic…
For a general dark-energy equation of state, we estimate the maximum possible radius of massive structures that are not destabilized by the acceleration of the cosmological expansion. A comparison with known stable structures constrains the…
Computer simulations of a model glass-forming system are presented, which are particularly sensitive to the correlation between the dynamics and the topography of the potential energy landscape. This analysis clearly reveals that in the…