Related papers: Breaking of a metastable string at finite temperat…
We consider the phase transition of a string with tension $\eps_1$ to a string with a smaller tension $\eps_2$. The transition proceeds through quantum tunneling, and we calculate in arbitrary number of dimensions the pre-exponential factor…
We consider decay of metastable topological configurations such as strings and domain walls. The transition from a state with higher energy density to a state with lower one proceeds through quantum tunneling or through thermally catalyzed…
The problem of a massive elastic string depinning from a linear defect under the action of a small driving force is considered. To exponential accuracy the decay rate is calculated with the help of the instanton method; then, fluctuations…
The decay rate of metastable states is determined at high temperatures by thermal activation, whereas at temperatures close to zero quantum tunneling is relevant. At some temperature $T_{c}$ the transition from classical to…
Metastable cosmic strings appear in models of new physics with a two-step symmetry breaking $G\to H\to 1$, where $\pi_1(H)\neq 0$ and $\pi_1(G)=0$. They decay via the monopole-antimonopole pair creation inside. Conventionally, the breaking…
We compute the decay rate of a metastable cosmic string in contact with a thermal bath by finding the instanton solution. The new feature is that this decay rate is found in the context of non thermal scalar fields in contact with a thermal…
Breaking of an atomic chain under stress is a collective many-particle tunneling phenomenon. We study classical dynamics in imaginary time by using conformal mapping technique, and derive an analytic formula for the probability of breaking.…
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…
String breaking is a central dynamical process in theories featuring confinement, where a string connecting two charges decays at the expense of the creation of new particle-antiparticle pairs. Here, we show that this process can also be…
An instantaneous temperature path of a point particle in the space - temperature manifold can be represented as a string of length L=1/kT (thermostring). The thermostring swepts a surface in the space-time-temperature manyfold at its…
We calculate the probability of destruction of a metastable string by collisions of the Goldstone bosons, corresponding to the transverse waves on the string. We find a general formula that allows to determine the probability of the string…
In the present paper, we study a model of a thermoelastic string that is initially heated. We classify all the possible asymptotic states when time tends to infinity of such a model. Actually, we show that whatever the initial data is, a…
We present a theory of the melting of elemental solids as a dislocation-mediated phase transition. We model dislocations near melt as non-interacting closed strings on a lattice. In this framework we derive simple expressions for the…
The decay rate for a particle in a metastable cubic potential is investigated in the quantum regime by the Euclidean path integral method in semiclassical approximation. The imaginary time formalism allows one to monitor the system as a…
One of the most intriguing features of string thermodynamics is thermal duality, which relates the physics at temperature T to the physics at inverse temperature 1/T. Unfortunately, the traditional definitions of thermodynamic quantities…
We investigate the Hagedorn transitions of string networks with Y-junctions as may occur, for example, with (p,q) cosmic superstrings. In a simplified model with three different types of string, the partition function reduces to three…
The decay of a metastable system is described by extending Kramers' method to the quantal regime. For temperatures above twice the crossover value we recover the result known from applying Euclidean path integrals to solvable models. Our…
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 generalize the string method, originally designed for the study of thermally activated rare events, to the calculation of quantum tunneling rates. This generalization is based on the analogy between quantum mechanics and statistical…
We study the thermal breakage of a discrete one-dimensional string, with open and fixed ends, in the heavily damped regime. Basing our analysis on the multidimensional Kramers escape theory, we are able to make analytical predictions on the…