Related papers: Classical Transitions for Flux Vacua
During eternal inflation, a landscape of vacua can be populated by the nucleation of bubbles. These bubbles inevitably collide, and collisions sometimes displace the field into a new minimum in a process known as a classical transition. In…
A dynamical description of the transitions between different backgrounds requires the existence of a background independent action which propagates the correct number of degrees of freedom and couples bulk supergravity to certain higher…
We consider classical dynamics of two real scalar fields within a model with the potential having a saddle point. The solitons of such model are field configurations that have the form of closed loops in the field space. We study the…
The understanding of how classical dynamics can emerge in closed quantum systems is a problem of fundamental importance. Remarkably, while classical behavior usually arises from coupling to thermal fluctuations or random spectral noise, it…
Supersymmetric flux compactification of F-theory in the geometric phase yields numerous vacua, and provides an ensemble of low-energy effective theories with different symmetry, matter multiplicity and Lagrangian parameters. Theoretical…
The dynamics of hybrid systems -- i.e. ones in which classical and quantum degrees of freedom co-exist and interact -- feature both diffusion in the classical sector and decoherence in the quantum state. In this article, we will consider…
Classical defects (monopoles, vortices, etc.) are a characteristic consequence of many phase transitions of quantum fields. We show a model in which the onset of classical probability distributions, for the long-wavelength modes at early…
Classical defects (monopoles, vortices, etc.) are a characteristic consequence of many phase transitions of quantum fields. Most likely these include transitions in the early universe and such defects would be expected to be present in the…
Establishing the existence of periodic orbits is one of the crucial and most intricate topics in the study of dynamical systems, and over the years, many methods have been developed to this end. On the other hand, finding closed orbits in…
We summarize an explicit construction of a duality cycle for geometric transitions in type II and heterotic theories. We emphasize that the manifolds with torsion constructed with this duality cycle are crucial for understanding different…
We study the global structure of vacua of heterotic strings compactified on orbifolds $T^4/Z_N$ (N=2,3) in the presence of heterotic 5-branes. Gauge symmetry breaking associated with orbifold is described by instantons in the field theory.…
We describe a computational investigation of tunneling at finite energy in a weakly coupled quantum mechanical system with two degrees of freedom. We compare a full quantum mechanical analysis to the results obtained by making use of a…
We study "vacuum crossing", which occurs when the vacua of a theory are exchanged as we vary some periodic parameter $\theta$ in a closed loop. We show that vacuum crossing is a useful non-perturbative tool to study strongly-coupled quantum…
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…
Instanton-like transitions (``shadow processes'') are considered in (1+1) dimensional models with one scalar field whose potential is a quadratic well with a cliff. The corresponding classical boundary value problem is solved, and the…
Identifying flux vacua in string theory with stabilized complex structure moduli presents a significant challenge, necessitating the minimization of a scalar potential complicated by infinitely many exponential corrections. In order to…
We report results of a classical simulation of thermal phase slips, and the associated relaxation of supercurrent, in a ring-shaped one-dimensional superfluid. We find that the classical relaxation rate vanishes in the uniform limit. This…
Recent years have seen a flurry of research activity in the study of minimal and autonomous information ratchets. However, the existing classical and quantum models are somewhat hard to compare, and, hence, quantifying possible quantum…
Motivated by recent discussions of the string-theory landscape, we propose field-theoretic realizations of models with large numbers of vacua. These models contain multiple U(1) gauge groups, and can be interpreted as deconstructed versions…
We analyze transitions between heterotic vacua with distinct gauge bundles using two complementary methods - the effective four-dimensional field theory and the corresponding geometry. From the viewpoint of effective field theory, such…