Related papers: Cosmology with a decaying vacuum
We present a detailed discussion of some features of quantum mechanical metastability. We analyze the nature of decaying (quasistationary) states and the regime of validity of the exponencial law, as well as decays at finite temperature. We…
It is extraordinary that a number of observations indicate that we live in a spatially flat, low matter density Universe, which is currently undergoing a period of accelerating expansion. The effort to explain this current state has focused…
The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties. While this…
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…
Based on some observations, the apparent energy, associated with gravity, of vacuums is defined, with that of normal vacuums to be zero and that of the vacuums losing some energy to be negative. An important application of the energy is its…
We show that it is possible to realize an inflationary scenario even without conversion of the false vacuum energy to radiation. Such cosmological models have a deflationary stage in which $Ha^2$ is decreasing and radiation produced by…
The decay of an unstable system is usually described by an exponential law. Quantum mechanics predicts strong deviations of the survival probability from the exponential: indeed, the decay is initially quadratic, while at very large times…
We discuss the main myths related to the vacuum energy and cosmological constant, such as: ``unbearable lightness of space-time''; the dominating contribution of zero point energy of quantum fields to the vacuum energy; non-zero vacuum…
We aim at the construction of dark energy models without exotic matter but with a phantom-like equation of state (an effective phantom phase). The first model we consider is decaying vacuum cosmology where the fluctuations of the vacuum are…
The long-time behavior of the survival probability for unstable multilevel systems that follows the power-decay law is studied based on the N-level Friedrichs model, and is shown to depend on the initial population in unstable states. A…
We study properties of moving relativistic quantum unstable systems. We show that in contrast to the properties of classical particles and quantum stable objects the velocity of moving freely relativistic quantum unstable systems can not be…
The cosmological constant (vacuum energy) problem is analyzed within the scope of quantum theories with UV-cut-off or fundamental length. Various cases associated with the appearance of the latter are considered both using the Generalized…
In many interesting models, including superstring theories, a negative vacuum energy is predicted. Although this effect is usually regarded as undesirable from a cosmological point of view, we show that this can be the basis for a new…
We investigate two simplified non-singular cyclic models with a negative time-varying cosmological constant to represent the non-conventional mechanism of negative cosmological constant expected to address the late-time cosmic acceleration.…
I discuss empty space, as it appears in the physical foundations of relativistic field theories and in the semiclassical study of isolated systems. Of particular interest is the relationship between empirical measurements of the…
We explore the possibility that theories with negative kinetic energy (ghosts) can be meta-stable up to cosmologically long times. In classical mechanics, ghosts undergo spontaneous lockdown rather than run-away if weakly-coupled and…
Recently, the observed equation of state for dark energy appears to favor values below $-1$. The tendency implies that the nature of dark energy may be quite different from that of the cosmological constant. In view of the adjustment on the…
In our paper [Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 337 (1995)], we derived an exact expression for the survival and nonescape probabilities as an expansion in terms of resonant states. It was shown that these quantities exhibit at long times a different…
It is proposed that the vacuum admits two different phases as described by the Chaplygin equation of state or its generalised version: a phase where the energy density behaves as if dominated by non-relativistic matter and a de Sitter…
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…