Related papers: The Thin-Wall Approximation in Vacuum Decay: a Lem…
We investigate gravitational properties of thin planar wall solutions of the Einstein's equations in the weak field approximation. We find the general metric solutions and discuss the behavior of a particle placed initially at rest to one…
We study the decay of a thermally excited metastable vacuum in classical field theory using real-time numerical simulations. We find a significantly lower decay rate than predicted by standard thermal theory at moderate temperatures,…
We analyze the matching of high and low temperature expansions of the effective action of massive scalar fields confined between two infinite walls with different boundary conditions. One remarkable low temperature effect is the exponential…
The well-known Wall theorem states a simple and precise relation among temperature, pressure and density of a fluid at contact with a confining hard wall in thermodynamic equilibrium. In this Letter we develop an extension of the Wall…
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and…
The Next-to-Two-Higgs-Doublet model (N2HDM) has a rich vacuum structure where multiple electroweak (EW) breaking minima, as well as CP and electric-charge breaking minima, can coexist. These minima can be deeper than the electroweak vacuum…
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…
The quantum relative entropy is frequently used as a distance, or distinguishability measure between two quantum states. In this paper we study the relation between this measure and a number of other measures used for that purpose,…
In $N+1$ dimensions, false vacuum decay at zero temperature is dominated by the $O(N+1)$ symmetric instanton, a sphere of radius $R_0$, whereas at temperatures $T>>R_0^{-1}$, the decay is dominated by a `cylindrical' (static) $O(N)$…
Non-extreme walls (bubbles with two insides) and ultra-extreme walls (bubbles of false vacuum decay) are discussed. Their respective energy densities are higher and lower than that of the corresponding extreme (supersymmetric), planar…
Accuracy of the Kramers approximate formula for the thermal decay rate of the metastable state is studied for the two-dimensional potential pocket. This is done by the comparison with the quasistationary rate resulting from the dynamical…
We study the decay of the false vacuum in the regime where the quantum field theory analysis is not valid, since gravitational effects become important. This happens when the height of the barrier separating the false and the true vacuum is…
We introduce a new picture of vacuum decay which, in contrast to existing semiclassical techniques, provides a real-time description and does not rely on classically-forbidden tunneling paths. Using lattice simulations, we observe vacuum…
Whether the Standard Model electroweak vacuum is stable, metastable or unstable depends crucially on the top mass (and, to a lesser extent, on other measurable quantities). These topics are reviewed and updated by taking into account the…
The decay of quasi-stable quantum system involves primarily an outgoing probability current density. However, during the transition from exponential to inverse-power-law decay there are time intervals during which this current, although…
Fermi acceleration in a Fermi-Ulam model, consisting of an ensemble of particles bouncing between two, infinitely heavy, stochastically oscillating hard walls, is investigated. It is shown that the widely used approximation, neglecting the…
We quantize a scalar field at finite temperature T in the background of a classical black hole, adopting 't Hooft's ``brick wall'' model with generic mixed boundary conditions at the brick wall boundary. We first focus on the exactly…
Motivated by the work of Mersini, the particle production related to the tunneling in false vacuum decay is carefully investigated in the thin-wall approximation. It is shown that in this case the particle production is exponentially…
It is known that the overlap of two energy eigenstates in a decaying quantum system is bounded from above by a function of the energy detuning and the individual decay rates. This is usually traced back to the positive definiteness of an…
We study numerically the existence in a false vacuum, of magnetic monopoles which are ``thin-walled'', \ie, which correspond to a spherical region of radius $R$ that is essentially trivial surrounded by a wall of thickness $\Delta\ll R$,…