Related papers: String melting in a photon bath
We consider decay of metastable topological configurations such as strings and domain walls. The transition from a state with higher energy density to a state with lower one proceeds through quantum tunneling or through thermally catalyzed…
We study thermal effects on a decay process of a false vacuum in type IIA string theory. At finite temperature, the potential of the theory is corrected and also thermally excited modes enhance the decay rate. The false vacuum can…
We present a study of the decay of metastable states of a scalar field via thermal activation, in the presence of a finite density of fermions. The process we consider is the nucleation of ``{\it droplets}'' of true vacuum inside the false…
Temperature plays a crucial role in metastable phenomena, not only by contributing to determine the state (phase) of a system, but also ruling the decay probability to more stable states. Such a situation is encountered in many different…
We consider the phase transition of a string with tension $\eps_1$ to a string with a smaller tension $\eps_2$ at finite temperature. For sufficiently small temperatures the transition proceeds through thermally catalyzed quantum tunneling,…
We study the process of thermal activation mediated by sphaleron transitions by analyzing the real-time dynamics of the decay out of equilibrium in a $1+1$ dimensional field theory with a metastable state. The situation considered is that…
We study the average rate of change of energy for a static atom immersed in a thermal bath of electromagnetic radiation in the cosmic string spacetime and separately calculate the contributions of thermal fluctuations and radiation…
We study the thermodynamic behavior of a decaying scalar field coupled to a relativistic simple fluid. It is shown that if the decay products are represented by a thermalized bath, its temperature evolution law requires naturally a new…
We compute the corrections of thermal photons on the effective potential for the linear sigma model of QCD. Since we are interested in temperatures lower than the confinement temperature, we consider the scalar fields to be out of…
We consider the decay of cosmic strings that are trapped in the false vacuum in a theory of scalar electrodynamics in 3+1 dimensions. We restrict our analysis to the case of thin-walled cosmic strings which occur when large magnetic flux…
The decay rate of metastable states is determined at high temperatures by thermal activation, whereas at temperatures close to zero quantum tunneling is relevant. At some temperature $T_{c}$ the transition from classical to…
The problem of a massive elastic string depinning from a linear defect under the action of a small driving force is considered. To exponential accuracy the decay rate is calculated with the help of the instanton method; then, fluctuations…
We study analytically and numerically the decay of a metastable phase in (2+1)-dimensional classical scalar field theory coupled to a heat bath, which is equivalent to two-dimensional Euclidean quantum field theory at zero temperature. By a…
We consider the phase transition of a string with tension $\eps_1$ to a string with a smaller tension $\eps_2$. The transition proceeds through quantum tunneling, and we calculate in arbitrary number of dimensions the pre-exponential factor…
The damping process of a homogeneous oscillating scalar field that indirectly interacts with a thermal bath through a mediator field is investigated over a wide range of model parameters. We consider two types of mediator fields, those that…
Relaxation process of a coherent scalar field oscillation in the thermal bath is investigated using nonequilibrium quantum field theory. The Langevin-type equation of motion is obtained which has a memory term and both additive and…
We calculate the dissipation rate of a coherently oscillating scalar field in a thermal environment using nonequilibrium quantum field theory and apply it to the reheating stage after cosmic inflation. It is shown that the rate is…
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,…
We consider the de Sitter cosmology deformed by the presence of a thermal bath of radiation and/or time-dependent moduli fields. Depending on the parameters, either a first or second order phase transition can occur. In the first case, an…
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…