Related papers: Vacuum decay in multidimensional field landscapes:…
We discuss models in which vacua other than our own can be directly observed in the present universe. Models with density-dependent vacuum structure can give rise to `non-lethal'-vacua: vacua with lower energy-density than our vacuum, but…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
In the tight binding model with multiple degenerate vacua we might treat wave function overlaps as instanton tunnelings between different wells (vacua). An amplitude for such a tunneling process might be constructed as $\mathsf{T}_{i\to…
We consider the phenomenological consequences of sampling multiple vacua during inflation motivated by an enormous landscape. A generic consequence of this sampling is the formation of domain walls, characterized by the scale $\mu$ of the…
We provide a novel, concise and self-contained evaluation of true- and false vacuum decay rates in general relativity. We insist on general covariance and choose observable boundary conditions, which yields the well known false-vacuum decay…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
We suggest a technique that explicitly accounts for the structure of an initial state of quantum field in the semiclassical calculations of path integral in curved space-time, and consider decay of metastable state (conformal vacuum of…
We study the decay of a thermally excited metastable vacuum in classical field theory using real-time numerical simulations. We find a significantly lower decay rate than predicted by standard thermal theory at moderate temperatures,…
Quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field in empty space seem not to produce observable effects over the motion of a charged test particle. However, when a change in the background vacuum state is implemented, as for instance…
We address the possibility of false vacuum decay in $N=1$ supergravity theories, including those corresponding to superstring vacua. By establishing a Bogomol'nyi bound for the energy density stored in the domain wall of the $O(4)$…
We present a theory with axion flux monodromies coupled to gravity, that reduces to the local vacuum energy sequester below the axion mass scales. If the axion potentials include a term generated by nonperturbative couplings to gauge…
A QCD axion with a time-dependent decay constant has been known to be able to accommodate high-scale inflation without producing topological defects or too large isocurvature perturbations on CMB scales. We point out that a dynamical decay…
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…
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…
The standard bounce formalism for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum cannot be applied to theories in which the symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections, because in such theories the tree-level action has no bounce…
We construct a model with long-lived metastable vacua in which all the relevant parameters, including the supersymmetry breaking scale, are generated dynamically by dimensional transmutation. The metastable vacua appear along a…
Quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a false vacuum is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory. It is relevant to models of the early Universe, where the nucleation of bubbles gives rise to an inflationary universe and the…
Stringy effects on vacuum transitions are shown to include surprisingly large decay rates through very high potential barriers. This simple, yet counter-intuitive result will drastically modify the measure on the landscape of string vacua.
We investigate oscillating instanton solutions of a self-gravitating scalar field between degenerate vacua. We show that there exist O(4)-symmetric oscillating solutions in a de Sitter background. The geometry of this solution is finite and…
We revisit the problem of decay of a metastable vacuum induced by the presence of a particle. For the bosons of the `master field' the problem is solved in any number of dimensions in terms of the spontaneous decay rate of the false vacuum,…