Related papers: Minkowski vacua can be metastable
We study the gauge invariance of the decay rate of the false vacuum for the model in which the scalar field responsible for the false vacuum decay has gauge quantum number. In order to calculate the decay rate, one should integrate out the…
In this paper we present an elementary derivation of the semi-classical spectrum of neutral particles in a field theory with kink excitations. In the non-integrable cases, we show that each vacuum state cannot generically support more than…
We study the phase diagram and the stability of the ground state for certain four-dimensional gauge-Yukawa theories whose high-energy behaviour is controlled by an interacting fixed point. We also provide analytical and numerical results…
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,…
Buoyancy is a well-known effect in immiscible binary Bose-Einstein condensates. Depending on the differential confinement experienced by the two components, a bubble of one component sitting at the center of the other eventually floats to…
This article deals with the issues of global-in-time existence and asymptotic analysis of a fluid-particle interaction model in the so-called bubbling regime. The mixture occupies the physical space $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^3$ which may…
The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is a measure of the energy density of the vacuum. Therefore properties of the energy of the system in the metastable vacuum state reflect properties of $\Lambda = \Lambda(t)$. We analyze properties of the…
We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub…
We argue that the vast majority of flux vacua with small cosmological constant are unstable to rapid decay to a big crunch. Exceptions are states with large compactification volume and supersymmetric and approximately supersymmetric states.…
Metastability is a quintessential feature of first order quantum phase transitions, which is lost either by dynamical instability or by nucleating bubbles of a true vacuum through quantum tunneling. By considering a drive across the first…
A uniform in space, oscillatory in time plasma equilibrium sustained by a time-dependent current density is analytically and numerically studied resorting to particle-in-cell simulations. The dispersion relation is derived from the Vlasov…
False vacuum decay typically proceeds via the nucleation of spherical bubbles of true vacuum, described by $O(4)$ symmetric field configurations in Euclidean time. In this work, we investigate how the presence of cosmic strings can catalyze…
Discontinuous quantum phase transitions and the associated metastability play central roles in diverse areas of physics ranging from ferromagnetism to false vacuum decay in the early universe. Using strongly-interacting ultracold atoms in…
The Euclidean or Bunch-Davies O(4,1) invariant 'vacuum' state of quantum fields in global de Sitter space is shown to be unstable to small perturbations, even for a massive free field with no self-interactions. There are perturbations of…
In quantum field theory (QFT), the "vacuum" is not just empty space but the lowest-energy state of a quantum field. If the energy landscape has multiple local minima, the local ground states are the false vacuum (FV) which can tunnel…
The description of quantum field systems with meta-stable vacuum is motivated by studies of many physical problems (the decay of disoriented chiral condensate, the resonant decay of CP-odd meta-stable states, self-consistent model of QGP…
The quantum vacuum fluctuations of a neutral scalar field induced by background zero-range potentials concentrated on a flat hyperplane of co-dimension $1$ in $(d+1)$-dimensional Minkowski spacetime are investigated. Perfectly reflecting…
We revisit the calculation of vacuum entanglement entropy in free Maxwell theory in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Weyl invariance allows for this theory to be embedded as a patch inside the Einstein static universe. We use conformal…
Some false vacua do not decay via bounces. This usually happens when a flat direction of the tunneling action due to scale invariance is lifted to a sloping valley by a scale breaking perturbation, pushing the bounce off to infinity. We…
We study the structure of maps that Lorentz boosts induce on the spin degree of freedom of a system consisting of two massive spin-$1/2$ particles. We consider the case where the spin state is described by the Werner state and the momenta…