Related papers: Cosmology with a decaying vacuum
It is widely believed that as one of the candidates for dark energy, the cosmological constant should relate directly with the quantum vacuum. Despite decades of theoretical effects, however, there is still no quantitative interpretation of…
The decay of quasi-stable quantum system involves primarily an outgoing probability current density. However, during the transition from exponential to inverse-power-law decay there are time intervals during which this current, although…
The transformation of canonical decay laws of moving unstable quantum systems is studied by approximating, over intermediate times, the decay laws at rest with superpositions of exponential modes via the Prony analysis. The survival…
An expanding universe is not expected to have a static vacuum energy density. The so-called cosmological constant $\Lambda$ should be an approximation, certainly a good one for a fraction of a Hubble time, but it is most likely a temporary…
It is suggested that the true ground state of the world has exactly vanishing vacuum energy and that the cosmological constant that seems to have been observed is due to our region of the universe being stuck in a false vacuum, whose energy…
Quantum field theory is constructed upon the assumption of stabilities of the vacuum and of the one-particle state. For finite temperature, the one-particle state becomes unstable because of thermal fluctuations, whereas the thermal vacuum…
A metastable state, or a false vacuum, is not an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian in quantum field theory. Its energy density has a non-zero imaginary part equal to its decay width. Therefore, supersymmetry cannot be exact in the false vacuum.…
We investigate false vacuum decay of a relativistic scalar field initialized in the metastable minimum of an asymmetric double-well potential. The transition to the true ground state is a well-defined initial-value problem in real time,…
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…
The Fock-Krylov formalism for the calculation of survival probabilities of unstable states is revisited paying particular attention to the mathematical constraints on the density of states, the Fourier transform of which gives the survival…
We describe a link between the cosmological constant problem and the problem of time in quantum gravity. This arises by examining the relationship between the cosmological constant and vacuum energy in light of non-perturbative formulations…
The idea that the cosmological term, Lambda, should be a time dependent quantity in cosmology is a most natural one. It is difficult to conceive an expanding universe with a strictly constant vacuum energy density, namely one that has…
We derive the expression for the energy uncertainty of the final state of a decay of an unstable quantum state prepared at the initial time $t=0$. This expression is function of the time $t$ at which a measurement is performed to determine…
Physicists have speculated about the properties of the quantum vacuum for at least 85 years; however, only recently have they understood the quantum vacuum sufficiently well to begin making testable predictions. Specifically, using…
There appears to be three, perhaps related, ways of approaching the nature of vacuum energy . The first is to say that it is just the lowest energy state of a given, usually quantum, system. The second is to equate vacuum energy with the…
We find the novel effect on the decay of a false vacuum in view of quantum field theory, which is induced by a field coupling to the scalar field related to a first-order phase transition. This effect of the environment can never be…
The false vacuum is a metastable state that can occur in quantum field theory, and its decay was first studied semi-classically by Coleman. In this work we consider the 1+1 dimensional $\varphi^4$ theory, which is the simplest model that…
We take a phenomenological approach to study the cosmological evolution of decaying vacuum cosmology ($\Lambda(t)$CDM) based on a simple assumption about the form of the modified matter expansion rate. In this framework, almost all the…
We demonstrate that the probability density of a quantum state moving freely in one dimension may decay faster than 1/t. Inverse quadratic and cubic dependences are illustrated with analytically solvable examples. Decays faster than 1/t…
In quantum theory the vacuum is defined as a state of minimum energy that is devoid of particles but still not completely empty. It is perhaps more surprising that its definition depends on the geometry of the system and on the trajectory…