Related papers: Infrared Sensitivity of Unstable Vacua
Backreactions are considered in a de Sitter spacetime whose cosmological constant is generated by the potential of scalar field. The leading order gravitational effect of nonlinear matter fluctuations is analyzed and it is found that the…
We discuss the mechanism by which the field vacuum energy varies as a result of strong self-interaction. We propose a non-perturbative approach to treat strong interactions and discuss the problem in terms of quasi-particles describing the…
In gravitational theories with extra dimensions, it is argued that the existence of a positive vacuum energy generically implies catastrophic instability of our four-dimensional world. The most generic instability is a decompactification…
We study the backreaction of superhorizon fluctuations of a light quantum scalar field on a classical de Sitter geometry by means of the Wilsonian renormalisation group. This allows us to treat the gravitationally amplified fluctuations in…
Quantum field theory is constructed upon the assumption of stabilities of the vacuum and of the one-particle state. For finite temperature, the one-particle state becomes unstable because of thermal fluctuations, whereas the thermal vacuum…
It has been shown that gravitational fields produced by realistic classical-matter distributions can force quantum vacuum fluctuations of some nonminimally coupled free scalar fields to undergo a phase of exponential growth. The…
Parametric scale separation is notoriously difficult to achieve in flux compactifications of gravitational effective theories. An appealing alternative to conventional Freund-Rubin vacua involves Ricci-flat internal manifolds, where the…
Under the hypothesis that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
We address the problem of infrared singularities in the perturbation theory for disordered interacting systems in $d\leq 2$. We show that a typical, sufficiently large interacting system exhibits a linear instability in the spin triplet…
Instabilities of equilibrium quantum mechanics are common and well-understood. They are manifested for example in phase transitions, where a quantum system becomes so sensitive to perturbations that a symmetry can be spontaneously broken.…
The cosmological constant problem represents an evident tension between our present description of gravity and particle physics. Many solutions have been proposed, but experimental tests are always difficult or impossible to perform and…
Dynamical issues associated with quantum fields in Rindler space are addressed in a study of the interaction between two sources at rest generated by the exchange of scalar particles, photons and gravitons. These static interaction energies…
A variety of observations indicate that the universe is dominated by dark energy with negative pressure, one possibility for which is a cosmological constant. If the dark energy is a cosmological constant, a fundamental question is: Why has…
The cosmological constant problem arises because the magnitude of vacuum energy density predicted by quantum mechanics is about 120 orders of magnitude larger than the value implied by cosmological observations of accelerating cosmic…
The primordial perturbation is widely accepted to be generated through the vacuum fluctuation of the scalar field which drives inflation. It is, however, not completely clear what is the natural vacuum in the inflationary universe…
We study the instability of de Sitter space-time (dS) under thermal radiation in different vacua. We argue that the mode function solution of a scalar field in four-dimensional dS can be separated into the incoming and outgoing modes.…
The experimental data, as well as theoretical considerations allow (and, in some cases, require) the Universe at present to rest in a false vacuum, whose approximate stability imposes constraints on the model parameters. Under very general…
We discuss peculiarities of quantum fields in de Sitter space on the example of the self-interacting massive real scalar, minimally coupled to the gravity background. Non-conformal quantum field theories in de Sitter space show very special…
We explore the stability of domain wall and bubble solutions in theories with compact extra dimensions. The energy density stored inside of the wall can destabilize the volume modulus of a compactification, leading to solutions containing…
Gravitational holography is argued to render the cosmological constant stable against divergent quantum corrections. This provides a technically natural solution to the cosmological constant problem. Evidence for quantum stability of the…