Related papers: The Thin-Wall Approximation in Vacuum Decay: a Lem…
The valley structure associated with quantum meta-stability is examined. It is defined by the new valley equation, which enables consistent evaluation of the imaginary-time path-integral. We study the structure of this new valley equation…
The rate and manner of vacuum decay are calculated in an explicit flux compactification, including all thick-wall and gravitational effects. For landscapes built of many units of a single flux, the fastest decay is usually to discharge just…
A recent analysis of the false-vacuum decay in non-perturbative regimes is here extended in the presence of Einstein gravity, computing the corresponding effective potential and decay rate. We consider a $\lambda \phi^4$ scalar field theory…
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…
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 prove a lower bound on the relative entropy between two finite-dimensional states in terms of their entropy difference and the dimension of the underlying space. The inequality is tight in the sense that equality can be attained for any…
The stochastic limit approximation method for ``rapid'' decay is presented, where the damping rate \gamma is comparable to the system frequency \Omega, i.e., \gamma \sim \Omega, whereas the usual stochastic limit approximation is applied…
In a pioneering paper on the role of gravity on false vacuum decay, Coleman and De Luccia showed that a strong gravitational field can stabilize the false vacuum, suppressing the formation of true vacuum bubbles. This result is obtained for…
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…
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…
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 numerically study the evolution of a classical real scalar field in ${(1+1)}$ dimensions with initial conditions describing thermal fluctuations around a metastable vacuum. We track false vacuum decay in real time and compare several…
This paper is a pedagogical yet critical introduction to the quantum description of unstable systems, mostly at the level of a graduate quantum mechanics course. Quantum decays appear in many different fields of physics, and their…
This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We study a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum fluctuates…
In this Letter we investigate the rupture instability of thin liquid films by means of a bifurcation analysis in the vicinity of the short-scale instability threshold. The rupture time estimate obtained in closed form as a function of the…
The spectrum of created particles during the tunneling process, leading to the decay of a false vacuum state, is studied numerically in the thick-wall approximation. It is shown that in this case the particle production is very intensive…
Supersymmetric vacua are stable. It is interesting to ask: how long-lived are vacua which are nearly supersymmetric? This question is relevant if our universe is approximately supersymmetric. It is also of importance for a number of issues…
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 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…
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…