Related papers: On rolling, tunneling and decaying in some large N…
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 develop semiclassical methods for studying bubble nucleation in models with parameters that vary slowly in time. Introducing a more general rotation of the time contour allows access to a larger set of final states, and typically a…
The phenomenon of quantum tunneling is reviewed and an overview of applying approximate methods for studying this effect is given. An approach to a time-dependent formalism is proposed in one dimension and generalized to higher dimensions.…
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…
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…
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…
A standard approach to analyzing tunneling processes in various physical contexts is to use instanton or imaginary time path techniques. For systems in which the tunneling takes place in a time dependent setting, the standard methods are…
Equations of motion of large N quantum mechanics are solved for infinite N in the case of unbroken global O(N) symmetry. It is shown that the only correction to the action is a change in the potential. All characteristics of the motion…
We study tunneling in one-dimensional quantum mechanics using the path integral in real time, where solutions of the classical equation of motion live in the complex plane. Analyzing solutions with small (complex) energy, relevant for…
Quantum Tunneling is ubiquitous across different fields, from quantum chemical reactions, and magnetic materials to quantum simulators and quantum computers. While simulating the real-time quantum dynamics of tunneling is infeasible for…
For quantum theories with a classical limit (which includes the large N limits of typical field theories), we derive a hierarchy of evolution equations for equal time correlators which systematically incorporate corrections to the limiting…
We present a simple and intuitive description of both, the Schwinger effect and false vacuum decay through bubble nucleation, as tunneling problems in one-dimensional relativistic quantum mechanics. Both problems can be described by an…
Various topics related to the $O(N)$ model in one spacetime dimension (i.e. ordinary quantum mechanics) are considered. The focus is on a pedagogical presentation of quantum field theory methods in a simpler context where many exact results…
The field-theoretical description of quantum fluctuations on the background of a tunneling field $\sigma$ is revisited in the case of a functional Schrodinger approach. We apply this method in the case when quantum fluctuations are coupled…
In this brief note, by applying the stochastic approach to multiple fields, we estimate the probability of tunneling between vacua in a landscape with $\cal N$ fields. We find that the probability can be enhanced by large $\cal N$. When…
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…
We develop a new numerical scheme which allows precise solution of coherent tunneling problems, i.e., problems with exponentially small transition amplitudes between quasidegenerate states. We explain how this method works for the…
We study quantum mechanical tunneling using complex solutions of the classical field equations. Simple visualization techniques allow us to unify and generalize previous treatments, and straightforwardly show the connection to the standard…
We study a quantum dynamical system of N, O(N) symmetric, nonlinear oscillators as a toy model to investigate the systematics of a 1/N expansion. The closed time path (CTP) formalism melded with an expansion in 1/N is used to derive time…
Employing the time-dependent approach, we investigate a quantum tunneling decay of many-particle systems. We apply it to a one-dimensional three-body problem with a heavy core nucleus and two valence protons. We calculate the decay width…