Related papers: Barnacles and Gravity
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…
I show that cosmological bubble walls in the thin wall approximation are unstable to the creation of "barnacles" -- loci of different wall tension adjacent to regions filled with a third vacuum. Barnacle formation leads to the same…
The nucleation and evolution of bubbles are investigated in the model of an $O(3)$-symmetric scalar field coupled to gravity in the high temperature limit. It is shown that, in addition to the well-known bubble of which the inside region is…
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…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
The cosmological remnants of a first-order phase transition generally depend on the perturbations that the walls of expanding bubbles originate in the plasma. Several of the formation mechanisms occur when bubbles collide and lose their…
We investigate vacuum decays in the early Universe in the presence of curvature perturbations. For sufficiently large perturbations associated with over-densities, we find that the bounce solution develops an oscillating middle stage near…
We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false-vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations…
Vacuum bubbles, formed in first order phase transitions, have important implications for cosmology. In particular, they source gravitational waves. Usually, it is assumed that, once bubbles are materialized, their state, further evolution…
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…
We investigate a novel interplay between the decay and annihilation of a particle whose mass undergoes a large shift during a first order phase transition, leading to the particles becoming trapped in the false vacuum and enhancing their…
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…
This is the first in a series of papers where we study the dynamics of a bubble wall beyond usual approximations, such as the assumptions of spherical bubbles and infinitely thin walls. In this paper, we consider a vacuum phase transition.…
False vacuum decay in quantum mechanical first order phase transitions is a phenomenon with wide implications in cosmology, and presents interesting theoretical challenges. In the standard approach, it is assumed that false vacuum decay…
We investigate the semiclassical instability of the Randall-Sundrum brane world. We carefully analyze the bubble solution with the Randall-Sundrum background, which expresses the decay of the brane world. We evaluate the decay probability…
The interior of a vacuum bubble in de Sitter space may give an open universe with sufficient homogeneity to agree with observations. Here, previous work by Bucher, Goldhaber and Turok is extended to describe a thin bubble wall with nonzero…
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 investigate and classify the possible types of false vacuum bubbles in Einstein gravity. The false vacuum bubbles can occur only if gravity is taken into account. We show that there exist solutions only with compact geometries. The…
Cavitation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature and bubble dynamics in open spaces have been widely studied, but the effects of the wall on the dynamics of cavitation bubbles in confined spaces are still unclear. Here, the dynamics of…
Given a scalar field with metastable minima, bubbles nucleate quantum mechanically. When bubbles collide, energy stored in the bubble walls is converted into kinetic energy of the field. This kinetic energy can facilitate the classical…