Related papers: Influence of nontrivial backgrounds and decoherenc…
We study the effects of a fixed de Sitter geometry background in scenarios of false vacuum decay. It is currently understood that bubble nucleation processes associated with first order phase transitions are particularly important in…
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…
We consider vacuum decay in the presence of a non-minimal coupling to gravity. We extend the usual thin-wall solution to include the non-minimal coupling. We also perform a full numerical study and discuss the validity of the new thin-wall…
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…
In this letter we discuss cosmological first order phase transitions with de Sitter bubbles nucleating on (inhomogeneous) matter backgrounds. The de Sitter bubble can be a toy model for an inflationary phase of universes like our own. Using…
Quantum transitions among de Sitter and Minkowski spacetimes through bubble nucleation are revisited using the Hamiltonian formalism. We interpret tunnelling probabilities as relative probabilities: the ratio of the squared wave functionals…
We investigate the recent suggestion that a Minkowski vacuum is either absolutely stable, or it has a divergent decay rate and thus fails to have a locally Minkowski description. The divergence comes from boost integration over momenta of…
The nonlinear stability of Minkowski spacetime has been one of the central achievements in the mathematical theory of general relativity and, more broadly, in the analysis of nonlinear geometric wave equations. Since the seminal work of…
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…
We use a field theoretic generalization of the Wigner-Weisskopf method to study the stability of the Bunch-Davies vacuum state for a massless, conformally coupled interacting test field in de Sitter space. We find that in $\lambda \phi^4$…
We study the problem of false vacuum decay in arbitrary dimensions, in the presence of gravity, and compute the transition probability within the thin-wall approximation, generalising the results of Coleman and de Luccia. In the particular…
We study the decay of the false vacuum in the regime where the quantum field theory analysis is not valid, since gravitational effects become important. This happens when the height of the barrier separating the false and the true vacuum is…
We investigated the influence of \(\kappa\) Minkowski-type quantum spacetime on neutrino oscillations, revealing that spacetime fluctuations introduce a unique energy-dependent power law, \(E^{-4}\), in the decoherence effect for relic…
To resolve infrared problems with the de~Sitter invariant vacuum, we argue that the history of the de~Sitter phase is crucial. We illustrate how either (1)~the diagonalization of the Hamiltonian for long-wavelength modes or (2)~an explicit…
We study the effects of internal symmetries on the decay by bubble nucleation of a metastable false vacuum. The zero modes about the bounce solution that are associated with the breaking of continuous internal symmetries result in an…
In this work we investigate the semi-classical backreaction for a quantised conformal scalar field and classical vacuum energy. In contrast to the usual approximation of a closed system, our analysis includes an environmental sector such…
The interaction between three photons is studied in de Sitter ambient space formalism. As a special case the half harmonic generator is considered, {\it i.e.} one photon decays to two same-energy photons. The scattering matrix elements are…
Non-extreme walls (bubbles with two insides) and ultra-extreme walls (bubbles of false vacuum decay) are discussed. Their respective energy densities are higher and lower than that of the corresponding extreme (supersymmetric), planar…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
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…