Related papers: The spontaneous breaking of a metastable string
Perturbative estimates suggest that extended topological defects such as cosmic strings emit few particles, but numerical simulations of the fields from which they are constructed suggest the opposite. In this paper we study the decay of…
Motivated also by recent revival of interest about metastable string states (as cosmic strings or in accelerator physics), we study the decay, in presence of dimensional compactification, of a particular superstring state, which was proven…
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…
Decay law of a complicated unstable state formed in a high energy collision is described by the Fourier transform of the two-point correlation function of the scattering matrix. Although each constituent resonance state decays exponentially…
We study the statistics of the dissipated energy in the two-dimensional random fuse model for fracture under different imposed strain conditions. By means of extensive numerical simulations we compare different ways to compute the…
String breaking is an intriguing phenomenon crucial to the understanding of lattice gauge theories (LGTs), with strong relevance to both condensed matter and high-energy physics (HEP). Recent experiments investigating string breaking in…
In this article the quantum fluctuation of a rigid and static string is reported to be identical to a free quantum particle. Solutions similar to this static string have already been found in the semi-classical quantizaton of pulsating…
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 briefly introduce hysteresis in spatially extended systems and the dynamic phase transition observed as the frequency of the oscillating field increases beyond a critical value. Hysteresis and the decay of metastable phases are closely…
Superconductors are the only experimentally accessible systems with spontaneously broken gauge symmetries which support topologically nontrivial defects, namely string defects. We propose two experiments whose aim is the observation of the…
In the past three years our views on how the standard model of particle physics could be embedded into string theory have dramatically changed. The heterotic string is no longer the only possibility for such an embedding and other…
The history and importance of superdeformation in nuclei is briefly discussed. A simple two-level model is then employed to obtain an elegant expression for the branching ratio for the decay via the E1 process in the normal-deformed band of…
In this review article we present the calculation of the splitting rate in flat space of a macroscopic fundamental string either intersecting at a generic angle a Dp-brane or lying on it. The result is then applied, in the context of the…
We show theoretically the existence of a metastable state and the possibility of decay to the ground state through macroscopic quantum tunneling in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates with repulsive interactions. Numerical analysis of…
We have been examining the phenomenon of string breaking in QCD with two flavors of dynamical staggered quarks. We construct a transfer matrix from a combination of ``string'' and ``two-meson'' channels. Preliminary results with low…
We study the boundary state associated with the decay of an unstable D-brane with uniform electric field, 1>e>0 in the string units. Compactifying the D-brane along the direction of the electric field, we find that the decay process is…
Metastable self-organized electronic states in quantum materials are of fundamental importance, displaying emergent dynamical properties that may be used in new generations of sensors and memory devices. Such states are typically formed…
We study the small vibrations of an axially travelling string with a dashpoint damping at one end. The string is modelled by a wave equation in a time-dependent interval with two endpoints moving at a constant speed $v$. For the undamped…
We describe a new tunneling solution for the decay of a cosmic string into a burst of gravitational waves. We find the relevant instanton and compute the tunneling rate. Locally, our solution is just an analytic continuation of the Kerr…
The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or "string", which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero-temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in…