Related papers: Tunneling from a Minkowski vacuum to an AdS vacuum…
We give a simple argument suggesting that in a consistent quantum field theory tunneling from Minkowski to a lower energy vacuum must be impossible. Theories that allow for such a tunneling also allow for localized states of negative mass,…
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…
In Vilenkin's tunneling wavefunction proposal our expanding universe is born via a tunneling through a barrier from nothing at the zero scale factor. We explore the viability of this proposal for the spatially closed FLRW model with a…
We consider vacuum decay in the presence of a non-minimal coupling to gravity. We extend the usual thin-wall solution to include the non-minimal coupling. We also perform a full numerical study and discuss the validity of the new thin-wall…
We consider a single real scalar field in flat spacetime with a polynomial potential up to $\phi^4$, that has a local minimum, the false vacuum, and a deeper global minimum, the true vacuum. When the vacua are almost degenerate we are in…
We allow a scalar field on a flat FLRW background metric to tunnel between two degenerate vacua. The resulting true vacuum state then violates the Null Energy Condition, and the corresponding homogeneous fluid induces a bounce, after which…
We consider a minisuperspace model for a closed universe with small and positive cosmological constant, filled with a massive scalar field conformally coupled to gravity. In the quantum version of this model, the universe may undergo a…
The Standard Model Higgs potential may become unbounded from below at large field values, with important cosmological implications. For a potential of this form, the commonly assumed scenario of a nucleated thin-wall bubble driving the…
We study the motion of thin-shell bubbles and their tunneling in anti de Sitter (AdS) background. We are interested in the case when the outside of a shell is a Schwarzschild-AdS space (false vacuum) and the inside of it is an AdS space…
We address the possibility of false vacuum decay in $N=1$ supergravity theories, including those corresponding to superstring vacua. By establishing a Bogomol'nyi bound for the energy density stored in the domain wall of the $O(4)$…
Taking into account the Green-Schwarz anomaly counterterm in R-symmetry gauged $N=(1,0)$ supergravity in six dimensions, and the associated modification in the Maxwell kinetic term and potential, we observe that the theory admits…
A recent study of supersymmetric domain walls in $N=1$ supergravity theories revealed a new class of domain walls interpolating between supersymmetric vacua with different non-positive cosmological constants. We classify three classes of…
We revisit the famous Coleman-de Luccia formalism for decay of false vacuum in gravitational theory. Since the corresponding wave function is time-independent we argue that its instanton's interpretation as the decay rate probability is…
The Tunneling Potential Formalism was introduced to calculate the tunneling actions that control vacuum decay as an alternative to the standard Euclidean Formalism. The new approach sets the problem as a simple variational problem in field…
Perfectly conducting boundaries, and their Dirichlet counterparts for quantum scalar fields, predict nonintegrable energy densities. A more realistic model with a finite ultraviolet cutoff yields two inconsistent values for the force on a…
Coleman-de Luccia transitions are spontaneous processes of nucleation of bubbles within metastable gravitational vacua including in their interior a true stable vacuum. From the perspective of lower-dimensional gauged supergravities…
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…
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…
The false vacua of some potentials do not decay via Euclidean bounces. This typically happens for tunneling actions with a flat direction (in field configuration space) that is lifted by a perturbation into a sloping valley, pushing the…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…