Related papers: Vacuum Decay Induced by False Skyrmions
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…
False vacuum decay typically proceeds via the nucleation of spherical bubbles of true vacuum, described by $O(4)$ symmetric field configurations in Euclidean time. In this work, we investigate how the presence of cosmic strings can catalyze…
We recently investigated the nature of resonant tunnelling in standard scalar Quantum Field Theory, uncovering the conditions required for resonance. It was shown that whereas the homogeneous false vacuum may decay via bubble nucleation, it…
Tunneling in quantum field theory is well understood in the case of a single scalar field. However, in theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking, one has to take into account the additional zero modes which appear due to the Goldstone…
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…
We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false…
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…
The tunneling potential method to calculate the action for vacuum decay is an alternative to the Euclidean bounce method that has a number of attractive features. In this paper we extend the formalism to general spacetime dimension $d>2$…
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 discuss particle production associated with vacuum decay, which changes the mass of a scalar field coupled to a background field which induces the decay. By utilizing the Stokes phenomenon, we can optimally track the time-evolution of…
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…
Recently, a novel phenomenon is observed for vacuum decay to proceed via classically allowed dynamical evolution from initial configurations of false vacuum fluctuations. With the help of some occasionally developed large fluctuations in…
The transition from a false vacuum to the true vacuum is a real-time phenomenon of interest in many contexts. It represents a special challenge for strongly interacting non-Abelian gauge theories because standard spacetime lattices…
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…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
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…
We study false vacuum decays catalysed by magnetic monopoles which act as tunnelling sites with exponentially enhanced decay rates. The field profiles describing the decay do not have the typically assumed $O(3)/O(4)$ symmetry, thus…
With the Higgs mass now measured at the sub-percent level, the potential metastability of the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model (SM) motivates renewed study of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this note, we describe an…
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in…
The standard bounce formalism for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum cannot be applied to theories in which the symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections, because in such theories the tree-level action has no bounce…