Related papers: Tunneling with negative tension
We consider in detail how the quantum-mechanical tunneling phenomenon occurs in a well-behaved octic potential. Our main tool will be the euclidean propagator just evaluated between two minima of the potential at issue. For such a purpose…
We consider the de Sitter cosmology deformed by the presence of a thermal bath of radiation and/or time-dependent moduli fields. Depending on the parameters, either a first or second order phase transition can occur. In the first case, an…
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…
Bubbles of nothing (BoNs) describe the decay of spacetimes with compact dimensions and are thus of fundamental importance for many higher dimensional theories proposed beyond the Standard Model. BoNs admit a 4-dimensional description in…
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in…
We rederive and extend the amplitude for charged spherical shells tunneling through the outer horizon of charged black holes. In particular, we explicitly confirm that an effective action approach with natural initial conditions for a…
The proposal of a rapid sign-switching cosmological constant in the late universe, mirroring a transition from anti-de Sitter (AdS) to de Sitter (dS) space, has significantly improved the fit to observational data and provides a compelling…
This is the first in a series of papers where we study the dynamics of a bubble wall beyond usual approximations, such as the assumptions of spherical bubbles and infinitely thin walls. In this paper, we consider a vacuum phase transition.…
Nucleation rates for tunneling processes in Minkowski and de Sitter space are investigated, taking into account one loop prefactors. In particular, we con- sider the creation of membranes by an antisymmetric tensor field, analogous to…
We investigate the properties of vacuum decay taking into account a non-minimal coupling to gravity. We extend the standard thin-wall solution to include the non-minimal coupling and verify its validity by comparison with a full numerical…
Scalar field theory with an asymmetric potential is studied at zero temperature and high-temperature for $\phi^6$ potential. The equations of motion are solved numerically to obtain O(4) spherical symmetric and O(3) cylindrical symmetric…
Behavior of the Euclidean path integral at large orders of the perturbation series is studied. When the model allows tunneling, the path-integral functional in the zero instanton sector is known to be dominated by bounce-like configurations…
The physics of vortices, instantons and deconfinement is studied for layered superfluids in connection to bilayer quantum Hall systems at filling fraction nu=1. We develop an effective gauge theory taking into account both vortices and…
For O(4)-symmetric instantons, there are two complementary interpretations for their analytic continuations. One is the nothing-to-something interpretation, where the initial and final hypersurfaces are disconnected by Euclidean manifolds.…
Type II orientifolds based on Landau-Ginzburg models are used to describe moduli stabilization for flux compactifications of type II theories from the world-sheet CFT point of view. We show that for certain types of type IIB orientifolds…
We describe new bubble decays in pure D+1 dimensional Einstein theory with two compact directions. The instanton solution is constructed by analytic continuation of the Kaluza-Klein electrically charged black hole solution. We show that the…
We discuss new possible tunneling processes in the presence of gravity. We formulate quantum tunneling using the Wheeler-deWitt canonical quantization and the WKB approximation. The distinctive feature of our formulation is that it…
A bubble of nothing is a spacetime instability where a compact dimension collapses. After nucleation, it expands at the speed of light, leaving "nothing" behind. We argue that the topological and dynamical mechanisms which could protect a…
We consider new instantons that appear as a result of accounting for quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations naturally regularize the O(4) singular solutions abandoned in Coleman's theory. In the previous works [3,4] we showed how new…
We study the process of quantum tunnelling in scalar-tensor theories in which the scalar field is non-minimally coupled to gravity. In these theories gravitational instantons can deviate substantially from sphericity and can in fact develop…