Related papers: Topics in vacuum decay (Ph.D Thesis)
The vacuum state in quantum field theory is known to exhibit an important number of fundamental physical features. In this work we explore the possibility that this state could also present a non-trivial space-time structure on large…
Recent LHC results concerning the mass of the Higgs boson indicate that the vacuum in our Universe may be unstable. We analyze properties of unstable vacuum states from the point of view of the quantum theory of unstable states. From the…
The vacuum decay in a de Sitter universe is studied within semiclassical approximation for the class of effective inflaton potentials whose curvature at the top is close to a critical value. By comparing the actions of the Hawking - Moss…
We numerically examine the effect of thermal fluctuations on a first-order phase transition in 2+1 dimensions. By focusing on the expansion of a single bubble we are able to calculate changes in the bubble wall's velocity as well as changes…
We study the cosmology of complex multi-axion theories. With O(100) fields and GUT scale energies these theories contain a vast number of vacua, inflationary trajectories and a natural dark matter candidate. We demonstrate that the vacua…
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…
We discuss phenomenology of quantum vacuum. Phenomenology of macroscopic systems has three sources: thermodynamics, topology and symmetry. Momentum space topology determines the universality classes of fermionic vacua. The vacuum in its…
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and…
The kinematical phase space of classical gravitational field is flat (affine) and unbounded. Because of this, field variables may tend to infinity leading to appearance of singularities, which plague Einstein's theory of gravity. The…
We give a topological classification of the evolution of entanglement, particularly the different ways the entanglement can disappear. Four categories exhaust all possibilities given the initial quantum state is entangled and the final one…
We numerically study the evolution of a classical real scalar field in ${(1+1)}$ dimensions with initial conditions describing thermal fluctuations around a metastable vacuum. We track false vacuum decay in real time and compare several…
I describe a class of oscillating bounce solutions to the Euclidean field equations for gravity coupled to a scalar field theory with multiple vacua. I discuss their implications for vacuum tunneling transitions and for elucidating the…
We study statistical relationships between bubble walls in cosmological first-order phase transitions. We consider the conditional and joint probabilities for different points on the walls to remain uncollided at given times. We use these…
The quantum gravity vacuum must contain virtual fluctuations of black hole microstates. These extended-size fluctuations get `crushed' when a closed trapped surface forms, and turn into on-shell `fuzzball' states that resolve the…
de Sitter space-time has a one complex parameter family of invariant vacua for the theory of a free, massive scalar field. For most of these vacua, in an interacting scalar theory the one loop corrections diverge linearly for large values…
It is widely believed that the standard model is a low energy effective theory which may have higher dimensional non-renormalizable operators. The existence of these new operators can lead to interesting dynamics for the evolution of the…
In a pioneering paper on the role of gravity on false vacuum decay, Coleman and De Luccia showed that a strong gravitational field can stabilize the false vacuum, suppressing the formation of true vacuum bubbles. This result is obtained for…
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,…
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…
The tunnelling of virtual matter-antimatter pairs from the quantum vacuum in multidimensions is studied. We consider electric backgrounds as a linear combination of a spatial Sauter field and, interchangeably, certain weaker time dependent…