Related papers: String melting in a photon bath
Thermal inflation was proposed as a mechanism to dilute the density of cosmological moduli. Thermal inflation is driven by a complex scalar field possessing a large vacuum expectation value and a very flat potential, called a `flaton'. Such…
We study the false vacuum decay and bubble nucleation in the presence of a cosmic string in dS spacetime. A cosmic string induces a deficit angle in spacetime around itself so the nucleated bubble has the shape of a rugby ball. Working in…
We revisit the problem of decay of a metastable vacuum induced by the presence of a particle. For the bosons of the `master field' the problem is solved in any number of dimensions in terms of the spontaneous decay rate of the false vacuum,…
The quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a metastable state ("false vacuum decay") is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory and cosmology. This occurs via local formation of bubbles of true vacuum with their subsequent…
We apply the newly derived nonadiabatic golden-rule instanton theory to asymmetric models describing electron-transfer in solution. The models go beyond the usual spin-boson description and have anharmonic free-energy surfaces with…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
Metastable cosmic strings appear in models of new physics with a two-step symmetry breaking $G\to H\to 1$, where $\pi_1(H)\neq 0$ and $\pi_1(G)=0$. They decay via the monopole-antimonopole pair creation inside. Conventionally, the breaking…
We study the decay of the cosmological constant in two spacetime dimensions through production of pairs. We show that the same nucleation process looks as quantum mechanical tunneling (instanton) to one Killing observer and as thermal…
I present two interesting studies related to the role of solitons in theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. Quantised fermions coupled to solitons are known to induce fractional fermion number. I present an example where an unstable…
In quantum field theory, the decay of an extended metastable state into the real ground state is known as ``false vacuum decay'' and it takes place via the nucleation of spatially localized bubbles. Despite the large theoretical effort to…
Metastable `false' vacuum states are an important feature of the Standard Model of particle physics and many theories beyond it. Describing the dynamics of a phase transition out of a false vacuum via the nucleation of bubbles is essential…
We calculate the relaxation rate of a scalar field in a plasma of other scalars and fermions with gauge interactions using thermal quantum field theory. It yields the rate of cosmic reheating and thereby determines the temperature of the…
We show that a cosmic string associated with spontaneous $U(1)_R$ symmetry breaking gives a constraint for supersymmetric model building. In some models, the string can be viewed as a tube-like domain wall with a winding number…
A detailed simple model is applied to study a high temperature hydrogen plasma ball. It is assumed that the ions and delocalized electrons are distributed randomly throughout the charged plasma ball (extra/missing charge is assumed to be…
The standard bounce formalism for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum cannot be applied to theories in which the symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections, because in such theories the tree-level action has no bounce…
Instanton crystal is a fascinating phase which is encountered when the minimum of the free energy corresponds to a configuration with an imaginary-time-dependent order parameter in the form of a chain of alternating instantons and…
We investigate the metastability of scalar fields in quantum field theories at finite temperature, focusing on a detailed understanding of the bounce solution. At finite temperature, the bounce solution depends on two variables: the…
An instantaneous temperature path of a point particle in the space - temperature manifold can be represented as a string of length L=1/kT (thermostring). The thermostring swepts a surface in the space-time-temperature manyfold at its…
In models in which some of the scalar field are charged and some uncharged, interactions with a finite temperature plasma will lead to corrections to the effective potential of the charged fields which may stabilize embedded defects made up…
Quantum dissipation in thermal environment is investigated, using the path integral approach. The reduced density matrix of the harmonic oscillator system coupled to thermal bath of oscillators is derived for arbitrary spectrum of bath…