Related papers: The Thin-Wall Approximation in Vacuum Decay: a Lem…
In a continuing effort to understand divergences which occur when quantum fields are confined by bounding surfaces, we investigate local energy densities (and the local energy-momentum tensor) in the vicinity of a wall. In this paper,…
We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub…
We consider the model of a false vacuum bubble with a thin wall where the surface energy density is composed of two different components, "domain-wall" type and "dust" type, with opposite signs. We find stably oscillating solutions, which…
Internal waves describe the (linear) response of an incompressible stably stratified fluid to small perturbations. The inclination of their group velocity with respect to the vertical is completely determined by their frequency. Therefore…
There are several possible choices of the time parameter for the canonical description of a self-gravitating thin shell, but quantum thories built on different time parameters lead to unitarily inequivalent descriptions. We compare the…
The use of atomic decay rates as a probe of sub-vacuum phenomena will be studied. Because electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations are essential for radiative decay of excited atomic states, decay rates can serve as a measure of the suppression…
We consider a planar gravitating thick domain wall of the $\lambda \phi^4$ theory as a spacetime with finite thickness glued to two vacuum spacetimes on each side of it. Darmois junction conditions written on the boundaries of the thick…
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 introduce a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum…
The aim of this work is to make a further step towards the understanding of the near-critical reflection of internal gravity waves from a slope in the more general and realistic context where the size of viscosity $\nu$ and the size of…
We study the decay rate of a false vacuum in gauge theory at the one-loop level. We pay particular attention to the case where the bounce consists of an arbitrary number of scalar fields. With a multi-field bounce, which has a curved…
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…
Quantum field theories, at short scales, can be approximated by a scaling limit theory. In this approximation, an additional symmetry is gained, namely dilation covariance. To understand the structure of this dilation symmetry, we…
Temperature plays a crucial role in metastable phenomena, not only by contributing to determine the state (phase) of a system, but also ruling the decay probability to more stable states. Such a situation is encountered in many different…
Using numerical and analytic methods, we study quantum tunneling from a Minkowski false vacuum to an anti-de Sitter true vacuum. Scanning the parameter space of theories with quartic and non-polynomial potentials, we find that for any given…
We consider a linearized, effective quantum theory of gravitation in which gravity weakens at energies higher than ~10^-3 eV in order to accommodate the apparent smallness of the cosmological constant. Such a theory predicts departures from…
Scalar field theory with an asymmetric potential is studied at zero temperature and high-temperature for $\phi^6$ potential. The equations of motion are solved numerically to obtain O(4) spherical symmetric and O(3) cylindrical symmetric…
In the presence of a gravitational field decay rates may significantly differ from flat space equivalent. By studying mutually interacting quantum fields the decay rates can be calculated on a given spacetime. This paper presents the…
We present a detailed non-perturbative analysis of the time-evolution of a well-known quantum-mechanical system - a particle between potential walls - describing the decay of unstable states. For sufficiently high barriers, corresponding to…
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…
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…