Related papers: Minkowski vacua can be metastable
Recently, questions have been raised about the role of Lorentz invariance in false vacuum decay. It has been argued that infinities may arise in an integration over Lorentz-boosted final states. This suggestion motivates a Minkowski-space…
In the context of false vacuum decay at zero temperature, it is well known that bubbles expand with uniform proper acceleration. We show that this uniformly accelerating expansion suffers from an instability related to the bubble size. This…
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…
It has been suggested recently that in a consistent theory any Minkowski vacuum must be exactly stable. As a result, a large class of theories that in ordinary treatment would appear sufficiently long-lived, in reality make no sense. In…
We present new solutions of vacuum decay in non-Minkowski spacetimes. On a de Sitter background, the tunneling between vacuum states with a nonvanishing energy difference has been considered, whereas in the special case of degenerate vacua…
The stability of our vacuum is analyzed and several aspects concerning this question are reviewed. 1) In the standard Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model we review the instability towards the formation of a bubble of lower energy density and…
The quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a metastable state ("false vacuum decay") is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory and cosmology. This occurs via local formation of bubbles of true vacuum with their subsequent…
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 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…
False-vacuum decay between two morphologically distinct supersolid phases via bubble nucleation is studied in a uniform dipolar gas confined to the plane. Starting from a metastable honeycomb state, the formation of stripe phase domains is…
We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false-vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations…
In quantum field theory, the decay of an extended metastable state into the real ground state is known as ``false vacuum decay'' and it takes place via the nucleation of spatially localized bubbles. Despite the large theoretical effort to…
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 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 $\lambda \phi^4$…
In relativity, there is no absolute notion of simultaneity, because two clocks that are in different places can always be desynchronized by a Lorentz boost. Here, we explore the implications of this effect for the quantum theory of unstable…
A consistency condition of general relativity as an effective field theory in Minkowskian background uniquely fixes the value of the cosmological constant. In two-loop calculations, including the interaction of gravitons with matter fields,…
Recent LHC results concerning the mass of the Higgs boson indicate that the vacuum in our Universe may be unstable. We analyze properties of unstable vacuum states from the point of view of the quantum theory of unstable states. From the…
We point out that the (pseudo-)conformal Universe scenario may be realized as decay of conformally invariant, metastable vacuum, which proceeds via spontaneous nucleation and subsequent growth of a bubble of a putative new phase. We study…
The $q$-theory formalism aims to describe the thermodynamics and dynamics of the deep quantum vacuum. The thermodynamics leads to an exact cancellation of the quantum-field zero-point-energies in equilibrium, which partly solves the main…
It is shown how metastable de Sitter vacua might arise from heterotic M-theory. The balancing of its two non-perturbative effects, open membrane instantons against gaugino condensation on the hidden boundary, which act with opposing forces…