Related papers: String melting in a photon bath
Quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a false vacuum is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory. It is relevant to models of the early Universe, where the nucleation of bubbles gives rise to an inflationary universe and the…
An earlier paper points out that a quantum treatment of the string landscape is necessary. It suggests that the wavefunction of the universe is mobile in the landscape until the universe reaches a meta-stable site with its cosmological…
The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or "string", which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero-temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in…
We present a systematic and unifying treatment of the problem of spontaneous nucleation of particle-antiparticle pairs in a (2+1)-dimensional system due to a static and uniform electromagnetic-like field, in the presence of quantum…
During cosmological inflation, it has been suggested that fields coupled to the inflaton can be excited by the slow-rolling inflaton into a quasi-stable non-vacuum state. Within this scenario of ``warm inflation'', this could allow for a…
The features for the unsteady process of thermal equilibration ("the fast motions") in a one-dimensional harmonic crystal lying in a viscous environment (e.g., a gas) are under investigation. It is assumed that initially the displacements…
We study particle acceleration in strongly turbulent pair plasmas using novel 3D Particle-in-Cell simulations, featuring particle injection from an external heat bath and diffusive escape. We demonstrate the formation of steady-state,…
During the last ten years a detailed investigation of preheating was performed for chaotic inflation and for hybrid inflation. However, nonperturbative effects during reheating in the new inflation scenario remained practically unexplored.…
We study the dynamics of a coherent state of closed type II string gravitons within the framework of the Steepest Entropy Ascent Quantum Thermodynamics, an effective model where the quantum evolution is driven by a maximal increase of…
Metastable cosmic strings provide a minimal and predictive origin for the stochastic gravitational-wave background reported by Pulsar Timing Array experiments. We analyse this possibility in electroweak-like dark sectors with a single-stage…
It has been shown previously, that the spatial thermal variation of a thermal medium can be recast as a variation in the Euclidean metric. It is now extended to temporal variations in temperature, for a non-relativistic thermal bath, which…
Decay of a scalar condensate via interactions with (quasi-)particles is of interest to many fields in physics, including cosmology. In cosmology, the decay of an inflaton condensate leads to the production of daughter particles and…
Phase transformations such as freezing typically start with heterogeneous nucleation. Heterogeneous nucleation near a wetting transition, of a crystalline phase is studied. The wetting transition occurs at or near a vapour-liquid transition…
The nucleosynthesis of heavy proton-rich nuclei in a stellar photon bath at temperatures of the astrophysical $\gamma$-process was investigated where the photon bath was simulated by the superposition of bremsstrahlung spectra with…
Electric fields can spontaneously decay via the Schwinger effect, the nucleation of a charged particle-anti particle pair separated by a critical distance $d$. What happens if the available distance is smaller than $d$? Previous work on…
Instanton theory relates the rate constant for tunneling through a barrier to the periodic classical trajectory on the upturned potential energy surface whose period is $\tau=\hbar/(k_{\rm B}T)$. Unfortunately, the standard theory is only…
We look for instanton solutions in a class of two scalar field gravity models, which includes the low energy string action in four dimensions. In models where the matter field has a potential with a false vacuum, we find that non-singular…
Local thermal instability can plausibly explain the formation of multiphase gas in many different astrophysical environments, but the theory is only well understood in the optically thin limit of the equations of radiation hydrodynamics…
One possible way in which phase transitions in the early universe may have ocurred is via nucleation of bubbles of the new phase (true vacuum) in the old phase (false vacuum). The technique most widely used to compute the probability of…
We recently investigated the nature of resonant tunnelling in standard scalar Quantum Field Theory, uncovering the conditions required for resonance. It was shown that whereas the homogeneous false vacuum may decay via bubble nucleation, it…