Related papers: Minkowski vacua can be metastable
In a pioneering paper on the role of gravity on false vacuum decay, Coleman and De Luccia showed that a strong gravitational field can stabilize the false vacuum, suppressing the formation of true vacuum bubbles. This result is obtained for…
It is suggested that the Minkowski vacuum of quantum field theories of a large number of fields N would be gravitationally unstable due to strong vacuum energy fluctuations unless an N dependent sub-Planckian ultraviolet momentum cutoff is…
We study the compactification of higher-dimensional Lovelock gravity on compact irreducible symmetric spaces, focusing on conditions under which a physically healthy four-dimensional Minkowski vacuum exists. We show that when the internal…
In recent papers [1,2], it has been shown that the presence of negative norm states or negative frequency solutions are indispensable for a fully covariant quantization of the minimally coupled scalar field in de Sitter space. Their…
Minkowski vacuum is empty from the perspective of Unruh-Minkowski photons, however, in the Rindler picture, it is filled with entangled pairs of Rindler photons. A ground-state atom uniformly accelerated through Minkowski vacuum can become…
We discuss boosts in a deformed Minkowski space, i.e. a four-dimensional space-time with metric coefficients depending on non-metric coordinates (in particular on the energy). The general form of a boost in an arbitrary direction is derived…
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…
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…
Minkowski spacetime is a convenient setting for the study of the relativistic dynamics of particles and fields in the vacuum. In order to study events that occur in a dielectric or other linear medium, we adopt the familiar continuum…
A uniformly accelerating observer perceives the Minkowski vacuum state as a thermal bath of radiation. We point out that this field-theory effect can be derived, for any dimension higher than two, without actually invoking very high energy…
We consider a massless, minimally coupled scalar with a quartic self-interaction which is released in Bunch-Davies vacuum in locally de Sitter background of an inflating universe. It was shown, in this system, that quantum effects can…
The probability of destruction of a metastable vacuum state by the field of a highly virtual particle with energy $E$ is calculated for a (3+1) dimensional theory in the leading WKB approximation in the thin-wall limit. It is found that the…
In this paper we study a new symmetry argument that results in a vacuum state with strictly vanishing vacuum energy. This argument exploits the well-known feature that de Sitter and Anti- de Sitter space are related by analytic…
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…
Two initially correlated coherent states, each interacting with its own independent dissipative environment exhibit a sudden transition from classical to quantum decoherence. This change in the dynamics is a turning point in the…
KKLT give a mechanism to generate de Sitter vacua in string theory. And recently, the scenario, {\em landscape}, is suggested to explain the problem of the cosmological constant. In this scenario, the cosmological constant is a de Sitter…
The master equation describing the completely positive time evolution of a uniformly accelerated two-level system in weak interaction with a scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum is derived and explicitly solved. It encodes the well known…
From calculations of the variance of fluctuations and of the mean of the energy density of a massless scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum as a function of an intrinsic scale defined by the world function between two nearby points (as used…
Families of Lorentz, but not Poincare, invariant vacua are constructed for a massless scalar field in 4D Minkowski space. These are generalizations of the Rindler vacuum with a larger symmetry group. Explicit expressions are given as…
We introduce a new mechanism for producing locally stable de-Sitter or Minkowski vacua, with spontaneously broken N=1 supersymmetry and no massless scalars, applicable to superstring and M-theory compactifications with fluxes. We illustrate…