Related papers: On the Decay Rate of the False Vacuum
We study the distribution of the Schmidt coefficients of the reduced density matrix of a quantum system in a pure state. By applying general methods of statistical mechanics, we introduce a fictitious temperature and a partition function…
We consider a formalism to describe the false-vacuum decay of a scalar field in gauge theories in non-perturbative regimes. We find that the larger the gauge coupling with respect to the self-coupling of the scalar, the shallower the local…
In classical thermodynamic processes the unavoidable presence of irreversibility, quantified by the entropy production, carries two energetic footprints: the reduction of extractable work from the optimal, reversible case, and the…
We numerically study the evolution of a classical real scalar field in ${(1+1)}$ dimensions with initial conditions describing thermal fluctuations around a metastable vacuum. We track false vacuum decay in real time and compare several…
The thermal properties of ice, liquid water and steam are at odds with statistical theories applied to many-body systems. Here, these properties are quantitatively explained with a bulk-scale matter field emerging from the indefinite status…
The standard assumption for the equilibrium microcanonical state in quantum mechanics, that the system must be in one of the energy eigenstates, is weakened so as to allow superpositions of states. The weakened form of the microcanonical…
A novel approach to the Hamiltonian formulation of quantum field theory at finite temperature is presented. The temperature is introduced by compactification of a spatial dimension. The whole finite-temperature theory is encoded in the…
I discuss a formalism for computing quantum scattering amplitudes using a semiclassical expansion of a functional integral representation for the S-matrix. The classical background for the expansion is determined by solving the equations of…
This work extends the seminal work of Gottfried on the two-body quantum physics of particles interacting through a delta-shell potential to many-body physics by studying a system of non-relativistic particles when the thermal De-Broglie…
We develop a formalism that allows the computation of the quantum effective potential of a scalar order parameter in a class of holographic theories at finite temperature and charge density. The effective potential is a valuable tool for…
The eigenvalue statistics of quantum ideal gases with single particle energies $e_n=n^\alpha$ are studied. A recursion relation for the partition function allows to calculate the mean density of states from the asymptotic expansion for the…
The quantum Maxwell theory at finite temperature at equilibrium is studied on compact and closed manifolds in both the functional integral- and Hamiltonian formalism. The aim is to shed some light onto the interrelation between the topology…
We show numeric evidence that, at low enough temperatures, the potential energy density of a glass-forming liquid fluctuates over length scales much larger than the interaction range. We focus on the behavior of translationally invariant…
We analyze thermodynamic models for fluid systems in equilibrium based on a virial expansion of the internal energy in terms of the volume density. We prove that the models, formulated for finite-size systems with $N$ particles, are exactly…
A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…
Reduced large N gauge theories have a phase with unbroken center symmetry and phases in which that symmetry is broken for Polyakov loops in one or more lattice directions. The phase with unbroken symmetry is associated with the zero…
The Loschmidt echo is a measure of quantum irreversibility and is determined by the fidelity amplitude of an imperfect time-reversal protocol. Fidelity amplitude plays an important role both in the foundations of quantum mechanics and its…
The thermodynamic properties of superconducting electrons are usually studied by means of the quasi-particles distribution; but in this approach, the ground state energy and the dependence of the chemical potential on the electron density…
We describe a computational investigation of tunneling at finite energy in a weakly coupled quantum mechanical system with two degrees of freedom. We compare a full quantum mechanical analysis to the results obtained by making use of a…
False vacuum decay, a quantum mechanical first-order phase transition in scalar field theories, is an important phenomenon in early universe cosmology. Recently, real-time semi-classical techniques based on ensembles of lattice simulations…