Related papers: Topics in vacuum decay (Ph.D Thesis)
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…
Transition of the ground state of a classical $\Phi^4$ theory in 2+1 dimensions is studied from a metastable state into the stable equilibrium. The transition occurs in the broken $Z_2$ symmetry phase and is triggered by a vanishingly small…
We study how bubbles grow after the initial nucleation event in generic first-order cosmological phase transitions characterised by the values of latent heat, interface tension and correlation length, and driven by a scalar order parameter…
Our Universe may be a domain separated by physical phase boundaries from other domain-Universes with different vacuum energy density and matter content. The coexistence of different quantum vacua is perhaps regulated by the exchange of…
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…
Domain wall networks are two-dimensional topological defects generally predicted in many beyond standard model physics. In this Letter, we propose to solve the domain wall problem with the first-order phase transition. We numerically study…
We study the possibility of forming the false vacuum bubble nucleated within the true vacuum background via the true-to-false vacuum phase transition in curved spacetime. We consider a semiclassical Euclidean bubble in the Einstein theory…
We study strongly supercooled cosmological phase transitions. We perform numerical lattice simulations of two-bubble collisions and demonstrate that, depending on the scalar potential, in the collision the field can either bounce to a false…
We identify instantons representing vacuum decay in a 6-dimensional toy model for string theory flux compactifications, with the two extra dimensions compactified on a sphere. We evaluate the instanton action for tunneling between different…
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…
We investigate the recent suggestion that a Minkowski vacuum is either absolutely stable, or it has a divergent decay rate and thus fails to have a locally Minkowski description. The divergence comes from boost integration over momenta of…
The decay of a metastable false vacuum by bubble nucleation is studied in the high temperature limit of the gauge theory in which an SO(3) gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken to an SO(2). The effects of internal symmetry are so drastic…
In the tight binding model with multiple degenerate vacua we might treat wave function overlaps as instanton tunnelings between different wells (vacua). An amplitude for such a tunneling process might be constructed as $\mathsf{T}_{i\to…
Symmetry-breaking phase transitions are ubiquitous in condensed matter systems and in quantum field theories. There is also good reason to believe that they feature in the very early history of the Universe. At many such transitions…
Vacuum energy changes during cosmological phase transitions and becomes relatively important at epochs just before phase transitions. For a viable cosmology the vacuum energy just after a phase transition must be set by the critical…
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…
We consider phase transitions and their contributions to vacuum energy in the manifestly local theory of vacuum energy sequestering. We demonstrate that the absence of instabilities imposes constraints on the couplings of gravitating and…
Despite their tremendous successes, modern-day cosmology and particle physics harbor a variety of unresolved mysteries. Two of the biggest are the origin of the baryon asymmetry of the Universe and the existence and nature of dark matter.…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. We examine the evolution and collision of slow-moving…
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…