Related papers: Horizons and Tunneling in the Euclidean False Vacu…
Motivated by the work of Mersini, the particle production related to the tunneling in false vacuum decay is carefully investigated in the thin-wall approximation. It is shown that in this case the particle production is exponentially…
We study the possibility of forming the false vacuum bubble nucleated within the true vacuum background via the true-to-false vacuum phase transition in curved spacetime. We consider a semiclassical Euclidean bubble in the Einstein theory…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
The Euclidean action is calculated in the thin-wall approximation for a first-order vacuum phase transition in which the bubble appears symmetrically around either a global monopole or a gauge cosmic string. The bubble is assumed to be much…
We study the effect of vortices on the tunneling decay of a symmetry-breaking false vacuum in three spacetime dimensions with gravity. The scenario considered is one in which the initial state, rather than being the homogeneous false…
We consider the decay of vortices trapped in the false vacuum of a theory of scalar electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions. The potential is inspired by models with intermediate symmetry breaking to a metastable vacuum that completely breaks a…
We study Coleman-de Luccia tunneling in some detail. We show that, for a single scalar field potential with a true and a false vacuum, there are four types of tunneling, depending on the properties of the potential. A general tunneling…
Quantum tunneling from a thin wire or a thin film through a static potential barrier in a zero magnetic field is studied. The wire or the film should satisfy a condition of transverse quantization of levels and be inhomogeneous. Depending…
An Euclidean bounce describing vacuum decay can be considered as an infinite stack of concentric thin shells to which a thin-wall action can be assigned. The integral over all shells produces then a tunneling action that is precisely the…
We consider a wave-function approach to the false vacuum decay with gravity and present a new method to calculate the tunneling amplitude under the WKB approximation. The result agrees with the one obtained by the Euclidean path-integral…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
We investigate and classify the possible types of false vacuum bubbles in Einstein gravity. The false vacuum bubbles can occur only if gravity is taken into account. We show that there exist solutions only with compact geometries. The…
Coleman and De Luccia (CDL) showed that gravitational effects can prevent the decay by bubble nucleation of a Minkowski or AdS false vacuum. In their thin-wall approximation this happens whenever the surface tension in the bubble wall…
We recently investigated the nature of resonant tunnelling in standard scalar Quantum Field Theory, uncovering the conditions required for resonance. It was shown that whereas the homogeneous false vacuum may decay via bubble nucleation, it…
Motivated by cosmological examples we study quantum field theoretical tunnelling from an initial state where the "classical field", i.e. the vacuum expectation value of the field operator is spatially homogeneous but performing a…
The fundamental problem of how tunneling in thermal medium is completed is addressed, and a new time scale of order 1/friction for its termination, which is usually much shorter than the Hubble time, is pointed out. Enhanced non-linear…
We analyze quantum-mechanical counterpart of Newtonian cosmology and show that effects of zero-point motion eliminate classical density singularity. Quantum effects are particularly significant for closed Universes where without the…
We develop semiclassical methods for studying bubble nucleation in models with parameters that vary slowly in time. Introducing a more general rotation of the time contour allows access to a larger set of final states, and typically a…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
Using numerical and analytic methods, we study quantum tunneling from a Minkowski false vacuum to an anti-de Sitter true vacuum. Scanning the parameter space of theories with quartic and non-polynomial potentials, we find that for any given…