Related papers: Vacuum statistics and stability in axionic landsca…
Vacuum compactifications may suffer from instabilities under small perturbations or tunnel effects; both are difficult to analyze. In this paper we consider the issue from a higher-dimensional perspective. We first look at how stability…
The relative probability to decay towards different vacua during inflation is studied. The calculation is performed in single-field slow-roll potentials using the stochastic inflation formalism. Various situations are investigated,…
A QCD axion with a time-dependent decay constant has been known to be able to accommodate high-scale inflation without producing topological defects or too large isocurvature perturbations on CMB scales. We point out that a dynamical decay…
Within the quantum mechanical treatment of the decay problem one finds that at late times $t$ the survival probability of an unstable state cannot have the form of an exponentially decreasing function of time $t$ but it has an inverse…
One fundamental physics interpretation of Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) results is that the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe is driven not by the cosmological constant, but by a slowly rolling scalar field, a…
Recently there have been claims on model-independent evidence of dynamical dark energy. Herein we consider a fairly general class of cosmological models with a time-evolving cosmological term of the form $\Lambda(H)=C_0+C_H H^2+C_{\dot{H}}…
The Euclidean bounce for vacuum decay enjoys an $O(4)$ symmetry that is lost in the presence of impurities than can catalyze the decay. We present a formulation for the calculation of the tunneling decay action, that is explicitly positive…
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…
The vacuum is full of virtual particles which exist for short moments of time. In this paper we construct a chaotic model of vacuum fluctuations associated with a fundamental entropic field that generates an arrow of time. The dynamics can…
It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in…
Based on the properties of probability distributions of functions of random variables, we proposed earlier a simple stringy mechanism that prefers the meta-stable vacua with a small cosmological constant \Lambda. As an illustration of this…
In this thesis we present detailed analyses on various running vacuum models (RVM's), in which the vacuum energy density "runs" with the cosmic expansion. The RVM's are motivated from the renormalization group formalism of Quantum Field…
In order to deal with a large cosmological constant a relaxation mechanism based on modified gravity has been proposed recently. By virtue of this mechanism the effect of the vacuum energy density of a given quantum field/string theory (no…
The long time dynamics of large particles trapped in two inhomogeneous turbulent shear flows is studied experimentally. Both flows present a common feature, a shear region that separates two colliding circulations, but with different…
We study general properties of attractors for tachyonic potential chameleon scalar-field model which possess cosmological scaling solutions. An analytic formulation is given to obtain fixed points with a discussion on their stability. The…
The tunneling decay rate per unit volume in Quantum Field Theory (QFT), at order $\hbar$, is given by $\Gamma/V = Ae^{-B}$, where $B$ is the Euclidean action evaluated at the so-called bounce, and $A$ is proportional to the determinant of a…
The energy density of the vacuum, Lambda, is at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it. Approaches to this problem are tightly constrained by data ranging from elementary observations to precision…
Recently, the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable vacua, has been reformulated as an elementary variational problem in field space. This paper extends this formalism to…
The tunneling potential method to calculate the action for vacuum decay is an alternative to the Euclidean bounce method that has a number of attractive features. In this paper we extend the formalism to general spacetime dimension $d>2$…
We discover that quantum dynamical tunneling, occurring between phase space regions in a classically forbidden way, can break conserved quantities in pseudointegrable systems. We rigorously prove that a conserved quantity in a class of…