Related papers: Tunneling decay of false vortices

We study the effect of vortices on the tunneling decay of a symmetry-breaking false vacuum in three spacetime dimensions with gravity. The scenario considered is one in which the initial state, rather than being the homogeneous false…

We consider the decay of "false kinks," that is, kinks formed in a scalar field theory with a pair of degenerate symmetry-breaking false vacua in 1+1 dimensions. The true vacuum is symmetric. A second scalar field and a peculiar potential…

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…

We investigate the phenomenon of the decay of a supercurrent due to the zero-temperature quantum tunneling of vortices from the edge in a thin superconducting film in the absence of an external magnetic field. An explicit formula is derived…

We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub…

If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…

Quantum tunneling of vortices has been found to be an important novel phenomena for description of low temperature creep in high temperature superconductors (HTSCs). We speculate that quantum tunneling may be also exhibited in mesoscopic…

We introduce a new picture of vacuum decay which, in contrast to existing semiclassical techniques, provides a real-time description and does not rely on classically-forbidden tunneling paths. Using lattice simulations, we observe vacuum…

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…

In the standard lore the decay of the false vacuum of a single-field potential is described by a semi-classical Euclidean bounce configuration that can be found using overshoot/undershoot algorithms, and whose action suppresses…

Quantum vortices with more than a single circulation quantum are usually unstable and decay into clusters of smaller vortices. One way to prevent the decay is to place the vortex at the centre of a convergent (draining) fluid flow, which…

We present a simple and intuitive description of both, the Schwinger effect and false vacuum decay through bubble nucleation, as tunneling problems in one-dimensional relativistic quantum mechanics. Both problems can be described by an…

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…

Two dimensional hydrodynamical disks are nonlinearly unstable to the formation of vortices. Once formed, these vortices essentially survive forever. What happens in three dimensions? We show with pseudospectral simulations that in 3D a…

We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…

The false vacua of some potentials do not decay via Euclidean bounces. This typically happens for tunneling actions with a flat direction (in field configuration space) that is lifted by a perturbation into a sloping valley, pushing the…

A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…

The physics of vortices, instantons and deconfinement is studied for layered superfluids in connection to bilayer quantum Hall systems at filling fraction nu=1. We develop an effective gauge theory taking into account both vortices and…

We systematically analyze the decay of metastable topological defects that arise from the spontaneous breakdown of gauge or global symmetries. Quantum-mechanical tunneling rates are estimated for a variety of decay processes. The decay rate…

Using a new approach to the analysis of false vacuum decay based on the so-called tunneling potential, we develop a general method to find scalar potentials with a false vacuum with exactly solvable decay at the semi-classical level,…