Related papers: Tunneling without barriers with gravity
A de-Sitter gauge theory of the gravitational field is developed using a spherical symmetric Minkowski space-time as base manifold. The gravitational field is described by gauge potentials and the mathematical structure of the underlying…
The imaginary part of the one loop effective action in external backgrounds can be efficiently computed using worldline instantons which are closed periodic paths in spacetime. Exact solutions for nonstatic backgrounds are only known in…
We study multi-field tunneling using exact solutions for additive potentials. We introduce a binomial potential with non-integer powers that could be considered a generalization of the $4D$ Fubini instanton potential. Using scaling…
We identify instantons representing vacuum decay in a 6-dimensional toy model for string theory flux compactifications, with the two extra dimensions compactified on a sphere. We evaluate the instanton action for tunneling between different…
Nucleation rates for tunneling processes in Minkowski and de Sitter space are investigated, taking into account one loop prefactors. In particular, we con- sider the creation of membranes by an antisymmetric tensor field, analogous to…
We identify a new class of UV-complete instanton solutions that describe the false vacuum\- decay of a real scalar field in a particular curved spacetime background. To this end, we consider a simple scalar theory with a Coleman potential…
The decay rates of quasistable states in quantum field theories are usually calculated using instanton methods. Standard derivations of these methods rely in a crucial way upon deformations and analytic continuations of the physical…
We study the problem of false vacuum decay in arbitrary dimensions, in the presence of gravity, and compute the transition probability within the thin-wall approximation, generalising the results of Coleman and de Luccia. In the particular…
Quantum tunnelling, a hallmark phenomenon of quantum mechanics, allows particles to pass through the classically forbidden region. It underpins fundamental processes ranging from nuclear fusion and photosynthesis to the operation of…
Tunneling is an iconic concept that captures the peculiarity of quantum dynamics but, despite its ubiquity, questions remain. We focus on strong-field tunneling, which is vital to all attosecond science. We find an unexpected optical…
We analyze vacuum tunneling in quantum field theory in a general formalism by using the Wigner representation. In the standard instanton formalism, one usually approximates the initial false vacuum state by an eigenstate of the field…
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…
Nothing---the absence of spacetime---can be either an endpoint of tunneling, as in the bubble of nothing, or a starting point for tunneling, as in the quantum creation of a universe. We argue that these two tunnelings can be treated within…
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 O(4)-symmetric regular instanton solutions are studied within the framework of the Eddington-inspired-Born-Infeld gravity (EiBI). We find that the behavior of the solution would deviate from that in Einstein gravity when the kinetic…
We consider vacuum tunneling of a new kind where the false vacua are not translationally invariant, but have topological defects that break some of their translational symmetries. In the particular case where the topological defects are…
Metastable states decay at zero temperature through quantum tunneling at an exponentially small rate, which depends on the Coleman-de Luccia instanton, also known as bounce. In some theories, the bounce may not exist or its on-shell action…
Gravitational instantons ''Lambda-instantons'' are defined here for any given value Lambda of the cosmological constant. A multiple of the Euler characteristic appears as an upper bound for the de Sitter action and as a lower bound for a…
On an oriented, compact, connected, real four-dimensional manifold, $M$, we introduce a topological Lagrangian gauge field theory with a Bogomol'nyi structure that leads to non-singular, finite-Action, stable solutions to the variational…
Because of the presence of a cosmological horizon the dilute instanton gas approximation used for the derivation of the Coleman-De Luccia tunneling rate in de Sitter spacetime receives additional contributions due to the finite instanton…