Related papers: Decoherence delays false vacuum decay
We study the effects of gravitationally-driven decoherence on tunneling processes associated with false vacuum decays, such as the Coleman--De~Luccia instanton. We compute the thermal graviton-induced decoherence rate for a wave function…
Decoherence describes the tendency of quantum sub-systems to dynamically lose their quantum character. This happens when the quantum sub-system of interest interacts and becomes entangled with an environment that is traced out. For ordinary…
We compute the rate with which super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations are decohered during inflation, by their gravitational interactions with unobserved shorter-wavelength scalar and tensor modes. We do so using Open Effective Field Theory…
We investigate the negative modes about Coleman-De Luccia bounces governing vacuum transitions in de Sitter space, with the goal of gaining physical insight into the various anomalous results associated with these that have been reported in…
We investigate how quantum decoherence influences the tunneling dynamics of quantum fields in cosmological spacetimes. Specifically, we study a scalar field in an asymmetric double-well potential during inflation, coupled to environmental…
We analyse a decoherence effect, caused by the gravitational interaction between a massive body and the electromagnetic field. Assuming a quantum version of the light bending interaction, we show that it leads to decoherence of the mass if…
The thermodynamic behavior of a decaying vacuum cosmology describing the entire cosmological history evolving between two extreme (early and late time) de Sitter eras is investigated. The thermal evolution from the early de Sitter to the…
We address the long-standing puzzle of false vacuum decay catalyzed by black holes. Naively, small black holes with large Hawking temperatures can generate highly-boosted true vacuum bubbles in the early universe and trigger vacuum decay…
We study the negative modes of gravitational instantons representing vacuum decay in asymptotically flat space-time. We consider two different vacuum decay scenarios: the Coleman-de Luccia $\mathrm{O}(4)$-symmetric bubble, and…
We study the process whereby quantum cosmological perturbations become classical within inflationary cosmology. By setting up a master-equation formulation we show how quantum coherence for super-Hubble modes can be destroyed by their…
Collective states in cold nuclei are represented by a wave function that assigns coherent phases to the participating nucleons. The degree of coherence decreases with excitation energy above the yrast line because of coupling to the…
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…
Recently, a static gravitational field, such as that of the Earth, was proposed as a new source of decoherence [1]. We study the conditions under which it becomes the dominant decoherence effect in typical interferometric experiments. The…
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…
We study zero-temperature false vacuum decay in $D$ compact spatial dimensions and show that for volumes below a critical value a new bounce solution, different from Coleman's celebrated $O(D)$ bubble, mediates the decay process, and…
We study the contribution to the decay of de Sitter vacua from bounces with O(3) x O(2) symmetry. These correspond to the thermal production of a vacuum bubble at the center of a horizon volume with radius r_H and a temperature defined by…
We analyse vacuum decay in rotating BTZ black hole spacetimes with the thin wall approximation. Possible parameter regions for the vacuum decay are clarified. We find that the nucleation rate is dominated by the bounce solution with the…
The influence of the shape of scalar field potential on the outcome of vacuum decay in de Sitter universe is studied. Sufficient condition for vacuum decay via bubble formation, described by Coleman - de Luccia instanton, is revisited and…
The cold dark matter may be in a meta-stable state and decays to other particles with a very long lifetime. If the decaying products of the dark matter are weakly interacting, e.g. neutrinos, then it would have little impact on…
The vacuum decay in a de Sitter universe is studied within semiclassical approximation for the class of effective inflaton potentials whose curvature at the top is close to a critical value. By comparing the actions of the Hawking - Moss…