Related papers: Tunneling in Theories with Many Fields
Motivated by recent time domain experiments on ultrafast atom ionization, we analyze the transients and timescales that characterize, besides the relatively long lifetime, the decay by tunneling of a localized state. While the tunneling…
Theories with compact extra dimensions are sometimes unstable to decay into a bubble of nothing -- an instability resulting in the destruction of spacetime. We investigate the existence of these bubbles in theories where the moduli fields…
Open inflation scenario is attracting a renewed interest in the context of string landscape. Since there are a large number of metastable de Sitter vacua in string landscape, tunneling transitions to lower metastable vacua through the…
Motivated by the possibility of a string landscape, we reexamine tunneling of a scalar field across single/multiple barriers. Recent investigations have suggested modifications to the usual picture of false vacuum decay that lead to…
We review the formalism by which the tunnelling probability of an unstable ground state can be computed in quantum field theory, with special reference to the Standard Model of electroweak interactions. We describe in some detail the…
A wide variety of vacua, and their cosmological realization, may provide an explanation for the apparently anthropic choices of some parameters of particle physics and cosmology. If the probability on various parameters is weighted by…
I point out that the usual Coleman-de Luccia analysis of tunnelling via instantons between perturbatively stable minima using the thin-wall approximation misses one of the effects of gravitational backreaction on the on-shell action and…
We revisit the formalism for tunneling in quantum field theory developed by Coleman and collaborators. In particular using the generalization of WKB methods for tunneling in quantum mechanics we avoid the problems with negative eigenvalues…
We point out that the (pseudo-)conformal Universe scenario may be realized as decay of conformally invariant, metastable vacuum, which proceeds via spontaneous nucleation and subsequent growth of a bubble of a putative new phase. We study…
The cosmological constant and the Higgs mass seem unnaturally small and anthropically selected. We show that both can be efficiently scanned in Quantum Field Theories with a large enough number of vacua controllable thanks to approximated…
Anthropic solutions to the cosmological constant problem require seemingly unnatural scalar field potentials with a very small slope or domain walls (branes) with a very small coupling to a four-form field. Here we introduce a class of…
We consider the Skyrme model modified by the addition of mass terms which explicitly break chiral symmetry and pick out a specific point on the model's target space as the unique true vacuum. However, they also allow the possibility of…
We show an inconsistence of the novel 4D Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity by considering a quantum tunneling process of vacua. Using standard semi-classical techniques, we analytically study the vacuum decay rate for all allowed cases in the…
If the potential of a scalar field, Phi, which currently provides the ``dark energy'' of the universe, has a negative minimum -M_0^4, then quantum-mechanical fluctuations could nucleate a bubble of Phi at a negative value of the potential.…
In BP models with hundreds of fluxes, we compute the effects of cosmological dynamics on the probability distribution of landscape vacua. Starting from generic initial conditions, we find that most fluxes are dynamically driven into a…
We study tunneling in one-dimensional quantum mechanics using the path integral in real time, where solutions of the classical equation of motion live in the complex plane. Analyzing solutions with small (complex) energy, relevant for…
We consider a wide class of four-dimensional effective field theories in which gravity is coupled to multiple four-forms and their dual scalar fields, with membrane sources charged under the corresponding three-form potentials. Four-form…
We review recent work in which compactifications of string and M theory are constructed in which all scalar fields (moduli) are massive, and supersymmetry is broken with a small positive cosmological constant, features needed to reproduce…
Superstring theories are very promising theoretically, but the enormous landscape of string vacua and the (likely) very large underlying string scale imply that they may never be tested directly. Nevertheless, concrete constructions…
It is suggested that the Minkowski vacuum of quantum field theories of a large number of fields N would be gravitationally unstable due to strong vacuum energy fluctuations unless an N dependent sub-Planckian ultraviolet momentum cutoff is…