Related papers: Safety of Minkowski Vacuum
I argue that isolated vacua of M-theory, cannot in any conventional way be said to live in the same theory as other disconnected parts of the moduli space. The usual field theoretic mechanisms, which allow an observer in one disconnected…
We examine the descent via membrane nucleation through a landscape of vacua where the cosmological constant is given by a combination of four-form fluxes. It has been shown that this descent can be slowed exponentially for very low…
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…
From the modern viewpoint and by the geometric method, this paper provides a concise foundation for the quantum theory of massless spin-3/2 field in Minkowski spacetime, which includes both the one-particle's quantum mechanics and the…
In a static spacetime, the Killing time can be used to measure the time required for signals or objects to propagate between two of its orbits. By further restricting to spherically symmetric cases, one obtains a natural association between…
It is shown to all orders of perturbation theory that in the effective field theory of general relativity the condition of vanishing of the vacuum energy leads to the same value of the cosmological constant, viewed as a parameter of the…
The existence of quantum tunneling opens the possibility of a sudden spatial relocalization of a system after a minor modification of its parameters. Such a quantum analogue of the Thom's classical catastrophe would manifest itself,…
After a brief digression on the current landscape of theoretical physics and on some open questions pertaining to coherence with experimental results, still to be settled, it is shown that the properties of the Deformed Minkowski space lead…
The tunneling effect is the most popular phenomenon of quantum physics and is present in modern physical theories. Still, the most important features of this effect are already present in toy models - low dimensional quantum mechanics with…
Theories with compact extra dimensions are sometimes unstable to decay into a bubble of nothing -- an instability resulting in the destruction of spacetime. We investigate the existence of these bubbles in theories where the moduli fields…
Quantum field theory allows for the suppression of vacuum fluctuations, leading to sub-vacuum phenomena. One of these is the appearance of local negative energy density. Selected aspects of negative energy will be reviewed, including the…
We consider (four dimensional) gravity coupled to a scalar field with potential V(\phi). The potential satisfies the positive energy theorem for solutions that asymptotically tend to a negative local minimum. We show that for a large class…
Quantum tunneling across double potential barriers is studied. With the assumption that the real space is a continuum, it is rigorously proved that large barriers of arbitrary shapes can be penetrated by low-energy particles with a…
We complete our previous recent review on noncommutative field theory, discussing in particular the constructive aproach to the Grosse-Wulkenhaar theory. We also suggest that by gluing together many Grosse-Wulkenhaar theories at high energy…
In this article, we propose a resolution to the paradox of apparent superluminal velocities for tunneling particles, by a careful treatment of temporal observables in quantum theory and through a precise application of the duality between…
The functional renormalization group flow of a scalar field theory with quartic couplings and a sharp spatial momentum cutoff is presented in four-dimensional Minkowski space-time for the bare action by retaining the entanglement of the IR…
The Planck scale is usually believed to be an unpassable wall. Putting a cutoff there and thinking of it as a quantized spacetime entity shows that. However, this is exactly the cause of many problems in quantum gravity. The cosmological…
A class of spacetimes (comprising the Alcubierre bubble, Krasnikov tube, and a certain type of wormholes) is considered that admits `superluminal travel' in a strictly defined sense. Such spacetimes (they are called `shortcuts' in this…
A plausible physical interpretation of the renormalizability condition is given. It is shown that renormalizable quantum field theories describe such systems wherein the tendency to collapse associated with vacuum fluctuations of attractive…
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…