Related papers: Tunneling in Axion Monodromy
Cosmic inflation is one of the most important paradigms in modern cosmology. In its simplest form, inflation is driven by a single inflaton field. However, multi-field inflation has become increasingly attractive because it can solve many…
The tunneling hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wavefunctions. Our problem is here applying what we did in the first paper to a driven…
A semi-classical model based on quantum time concepts is presented for the evaluation of bremsstrahlung emission probabilities in alpha decay of nuclei. The contribution to the bremsstrahlung emission from the different regions in tunneling…
We study statistical relationships between bubble walls in cosmological first-order phase transitions. We consider the conditional and joint probabilities for different points on the walls to remain uncollided at given times. We use these…
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…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
We present a new type of one-field models for open inflation utilizing a nonminimally coupled scalar field with polynomial potentials in which the Coleman-de Luccia instanton does exist and slow-roll inflation after the bubble nucleation is…
Starting from a mean-field model of the Bose-Einstein condensate dimer, we reintroduce classically forbidden tunneling through a Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization approach. We find closed-form approximations to the tunneling frequency more…
The theory of false vacuum decay in a thermal system may have a cross-over from predominantly thermal transitions to quantum transitions as the temperature is decreased. New numerical methods and results are presented here that can be used…
We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…
It has recently been shown in high resolution numerical simulations that relativistic collisions of bubbles in the context of a multi-vacua potential may lead to the creation of bubbles in a new vacuum. In this paper, we show that scalar…
Large field excursions are required in a number of axion models of inflation. These models also possess global cosmic strings, around which the axion follows a path mirroring the inflationary trajectory. Cosmic strings are thus an…
We derive the rate for transitions between de Sitter vacua by treating the field theory on the static patch as a thermal system. This reproduces the Coleman-De Luccia formalism for calculating the rate, but leads to a modified…
Tunneling in quantum field theory is worth understanding properly, not least because it controls the long term fate of our universe. There are however, a number of features of tunneling rate calculations which lack a desirable transparency,…
The recent BICEP2 measurements of B-modes indicate a large tensor-to-scalar ratio in inflationary cosmology, which points towards trans-Planckian evolution of the inflaton. We propose possible string-theory realizations thereof. Schemes for…
We provide a semiclassical theory of tunneling decay in a magnetic field and a three-dimensional potential of a general form. Because of broken time-reversal symmetry, the standard WKB technique has to be modified. The decay rate is found…
A study of the dynamics of a tunneling particle in a driven bistable potential which is moderately-to-strongly coupled to a bath is presented. Upon restricting the system dynamics to the Hilbert space spanned by the M lowest energy…
We calculate bubble nucleation rates in a Lennard-Jones fluid through explicit molecular dynamics simulations. Our approach -- based on a recent free energy method (dubbed reweighted Jarzynski sampling), transition state theory, and a…
Recent developments in the understanding of real-time path integrals led to the development of the ``steadyon picture'' for the semi-classical calculation of quantum tunneling rates. We discuss tunneling out of a generic localized initial…
We study axion electrodynamics, including the Chern-Simons interaction term, in the presence of parallel background electric and magnetic fields, as can for example occur in certain models of axion inflation and in the study of dyonic black…