Related papers: Impact of Gravity on Vacuum Stability
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 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…
False vacuum decay in field theory may be formulated as a boundary value problem in Euclidean space. In a previous work, we studied its solution in single scalar field theories with quadratic gravity and used it to find obstructions to…
We study the impact of the ambient fluid on the evolution of collapsing false vacuum bubbles by simulating the dynamics of a coupled bubble-particle system. A significant increase in the mass of the particles across the bubble wall leads to…
Quantum gravity places important consistency conditions on low-energy effective field theory, such as the absence of global symmetries. These may have important consequences in the search for particle physics beyond the Standard Model. We…
The vacuum must contain virtual fluctuations of black hole microstates for each mass $M$. We observe that the expected suppression for $M\gg m_p$ is counteracted by the large number $Exp[S_{bek}]$ of such states. From string theory we learn…
We investigate gravitating lumps with a false vacuum core surrounded by the true vacuum in a scalar field potential. Such configurations become possible in the Einstein gravity in the presence of fermions at the core. Gravitational…
It has been suggested recently that in a consistent theory any Minkowski vacuum must be exactly stable. As a result, a large class of theories that in ordinary treatment would appear sufficiently long-lived, in reality make no sense. In…
We show that gravitational interactions between massless thermal modes and a nucleating Coleman-de Luccia bubble may lead to efficient decoherence and strongly suppress metastable vacuum decay for bubbles that are small compared to the…
A satisfactory theory of quantum gravity may necessitate a drastic modification of our perception of space-time, by giving it a foamy structure at distances comparable to the Planck length. It is argued in this essay that the experimental…
We study the false vacuum decay and bubble nucleation in the presence of a cosmic string in dS spacetime. A cosmic string induces a deficit angle in spacetime around itself so the nucleated bubble has the shape of a rugby ball. Working in…
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…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is developed, based on an analogy with a superconducting phaseshift in which free fermions coupled perturbatively to a weak gravitational field are in an unstable false vacuum state. The…
In this work, the behavior of test particles near a domain wall of a stable false vacuum bubble is studied. It is shown that matter is naturally trapped in the vicinity of a static domain wall, and also, that there is a discontinuity in the…
We investigate the properties of vacuum decay taking into account a non-minimal coupling to gravity. We extend the standard thin-wall solution to include the non-minimal coupling and verify its validity by comparison with a full numerical…
The 'thin-wall approximation' gives a simple estimate of the decay rate of an unstable quantum field. Unfortunately, the approximation is uncontrolled. In this paper I show that there are actually two different thin-wall approximations and…
We find the novel effect on the decay of a false vacuum in view of quantum field theory, which is induced by a field coupling to the scalar field related to a first-order phase transition. This effect of the environment can never be…
In this presentation, we discuss the nucleation and subsequent evolution of false vacuum bubbles in the scalar-tensor gravity. First, we transform the scalar-tensor type theory of gravity to the standard Brans-Dicke type. Second, we…
In the thin-wall approximation, the decay of a gravitating false vacuum to a lower-energy state is affected by the cosmological horizon structure in both spaces. The nucleation radius of a bubble of true vacuum depends on the surface…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…