Related papers: Tunnelling for Large N
The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting…
The relative probability to decay towards different vacua during inflation is studied. The calculation is performed in single-field slow-roll potentials using the stochastic inflation formalism. Various situations are investigated,…
We investigate vacuum statistics and stability in random axionic landscapes. For this purpose we developed an algorithm for a quick evaluation of the tunneling action, which in most cases is accurate within 10%. We find that stability of a…
The tunneling potential formalism makes it easy to construct exact solutions to the vacuum decay problem in potentials with multiple fields. While some exact solutions for single-field decays were known, we present the first nontrivial…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
This paper is devoted to the study of quantum dissipation in cluster decay phenomena in the frame of the Lindblad approach to quantum open systems. The tunneling of a metastable state across a piecewise quadratic potential is envisaged for…
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…
We consider the decay of vortices trapped in the false vacuum of a theory of scalar electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions. The potential is inspired by models with intermediate symmetry breaking to a metastable vacuum that completely breaks a…
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…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
Various aspects of time-dependent processes are studied within the large N approximation of O(N) vector models in three dimensions. These include the rolling of fields, the tunneling and decay of vacua. We present an exact solution for the…
We consider simple models of tunneling of an object with intrinsic degrees of freedom. This important problem was not extensively studied until now, in spite of numerous applications in various areas of physics and astrophysics. We show…
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…
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…
Based on the general form of the master equation for open quantum systems the tunneling is considered. Using the path integral technique a simple closed form expression for the tunneling rate through a parabolic barrier is obtained. The…
Motivated by cosmological examples we study quantum field theoretical tunnelling from an initial state where the "classical field", i.e. the vacuum expectation value of the field operator is spatially homogeneous but performing a…
Motivated by the possibility of a string landscape, we reexamine tunneling of a scalar field across single/multiple barriers. Recent investigations have suggested modifications to the usual picture of false vacuum decay that lead to…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
In any spacetime, it is possible to have a family of observers following a congruence of timelike curves such that they do not have access to part of the spacetime. This lack of information suggests associating a (congruence dependent)…