Related papers: Minkowski vacua can be metastable
We study the stability of supersymmetry breaking vacuum in the presence of cosmic strings arising in the messenger sector. For certain ranges of the couplings, the desired supersymmetry breaking vacua become unstable against decay into…
Understanding the non-deterministic behavior of deterministic nonlinear systems has been an implicit dream since Lorenz named it the "butterfly effect". A prominent example is the hysteresis and bistability of the Duffing oscillator, which…
The dissipative dynamics of a vortex in a finite temperature trapped Bose-Einstein condensate are shown to be governed by a {\em diffusive instability}. In the weakly interacting regime we find a cross-over from instability to metastability…
In a previous paper, two of the authors presented a "regulated" picture of eternal inflation. This picture both suggested and drew support from a conjectured discontinuity in the amplitude for tunneling from positive to negative vacuum…
In supersymmetric models with the run-away vacua or with the stable but non-supersymmetric ground state there exist stable field configurations (vacua) which restore one half of supersymmetry and are characterized by constant positive…
By quantizing the background as well as the perturbations in a simple one fluid cosmological model, we show that there exists an ambiguity in the choice of relevant variables, potentially leading to incompatible observational physical…
We study the dynamics of false vacuum bubbles in the Brans-Dicke theory of gravity by using the thin shell or thin wall approximation. We consider a false vacuum bubble that has a different value for the Brans-Dicke field between the inside…
A granular system confined in a quasi two-dimensional box that is vertically vibrated can transit to an absorbing state in which all particles bounce vertically in phase with the box, with no horizontal motion. In principle, this state can…
The incorporation of a small cosmological constant within radiatively-broken scale-invariant models is discussed. We show that phenomenologically consistent scale-invariant models can be constructed which allow a small positive cosmological…
The classical Minkowski inequality implies that the volume of a bounded convex domain is controlled from above by the integral of the mean curvature of its boundary. In this note, we establish an analogous inequality without the convexity…
Recent developments in unifying treatment of domain wall configurations and their global space-time structure is presented. Domain walls between vacua of non-equal cosmological constant fall in three classes depending on the value of their…
We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false…
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…
We study the propagation of bubbles of new vacuum in a radially inhomogeneous Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi background that includes a cosmological constant. This exemplifies the classical evolution of a tunneling bubble through a metastable state…
Vacuum excitation by time-varying boundary conditions is not only of fundamental importance but also has recently been confirmed in a laboratory experiment. In this paper, we study the vacuum excitation of a scalar field by the…
Many models of high energy physics possess metastable vacua. It is conceivable that the universe can get trapped in such a false vacuum, irrespective of its origin and prior history, at an earlier stage during its evolution. The ensuing…
Vacuum polarization of a massive scalar field in the background of a two-dimensional version of a spinning cosmic string is investigated. It is shown that when the `radius of the universe' is such that spacetime is globally hyperbolic the…
In this essay I point out that, in the context of semi-classical gravity, the equivalence principle can mitigate the cosmological constant problem. On a Minkowski space-time background with the usual $\mathbb{R}^4$ topology, the vacuum…
In the Einstein gravity, it is well-known that strictly stationary and vacuum regular spacetime should be the Minkowski spacetime. In the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory, we shall show the similar statement, that is, strictly static(no event…
A new exactly solvable case in strong-field quantum electrodynamics with a time-dependent external electric field is presented. The corresponding field is given by an analytic function, which is asymmetric (in contrast to Sauter-like…