Related papers: Horizons and Tunneling in the Euclidean False Vacu…
We consider the decay of "false kinks," that is, kinks formed in a scalar field theory with a pair of degenerate symmetry-breaking false vacua in 1+1 dimensions. The true vacuum is symmetric. A second scalar field and a peculiar potential…
I provide some simple physical arguments that, once gravitation and some subtleties are taken into account, rather broad classes of potentials result in instantons which tunnel relatively rapidly between perturbatively stable minima. In…
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and…
We study the contribution to the decay of de Sitter vacua from bounces with O(3) x O(2) symmetry. These correspond to the thermal production of a vacuum bubble at the center of a horizon volume with radius r_H and a temperature defined by…
We study numerically the existence in a false vacuum, of magnetic monopoles which are ``thin-walled'', \ie, which correspond to a spherical region of radius $R$ that is essentially trivial surrounded by a wall of thickness $\Delta\ll R$,…
In the Hartle-Hawking ``no boundary'' approach to quantum cosmology, a real tunneling geometry is a configuration that represents a transition from a compact Riemannian spacetime to a Lorentzian universe. I complete an earlier proof that in…
The 'thin-wall approximation' gives a simple estimate of the decay rate of an unstable quantum field. Unfortunately, the approximation is uncontrolled. In this paper I show that there are actually two different thin-wall approximations and…
We discuss the possible influence of a cosmic magnetic field on the macroscopic quantum tunneling process associated, in a cosmological context, to the decay of the "false vacuum." We find a close analogy with the effects of an external…
The chiral soliton lattice is an array of topological solitons realized as ground states of QCD at finite density under strong magnetic fields or rapid rotation, and chiral magnets with an easy-plane anisotropy. In such cases, topological…
The quantum field theory for a massless scalar field on a two-dimensional non-singular black hole spacetime gives a non-vanishing probability for a particle to tunnel out of the black hole. The black hole spacetime contains an outer and an…
The experimental data, as well as theoretical considerations allow (and, in some cases, require) the Universe at present to rest in a false vacuum, whose approximate stability imposes constraints on the model parameters. Under very general…
We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…
The tunneling potential method to calculate the action for vacuum decay is an alternative to the Euclidean bounce method that has a number of attractive features. In this paper we extend the formalism to general spacetime dimension $d>2$…
The Standard Model Higgs potential may become unbounded from below at large field values, with important cosmological implications. For a potential of this form, the commonly assumed scenario of a nucleated thin-wall bubble driving the…
We find the novel effect on the decay of a false vacuum in view of quantum field theory, which is induced by a field coupling to the scalar field related to a first-order phase transition. This effect of the environment can never be…
We extend the study of the effect of static primordial black holes on vacuum decay. In particular, we compare the tunneling rates between vacua of different values of the cosmological constant and black hole mass by pointing out the…
The ``reliability horizon'' for semi-classical quantum gravity quantifies the extent to which we should trust semi-classical quantum gravity, and gives a handle on just where the ``Planck regime'' resides. The key obstruction to pushing…
In the semiclassical domain the exponent of vortex quantum tunneling is dominated by a volume which is associated with the path the vortex line traces out during its escape from the metastable well. We explicitly show the influence of…
Under the hypothesis 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…
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…