Related papers: Vacuum Decay Induced by False Skyrmions
Vacuum decay posits that the universe's apparent vacuum is metastable and could transition to a lower-energy state. According to current physics models, if such a transition occurred in any location, a region of "true vacuum" would…
The probability of destruction of a metastable vacuum state by the field of a highly virtual particle with energy $E$ is calculated for a (3+1) dimensional theory in the leading WKB approximation in the thin-wall limit. It is found that the…
The low energy regime of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) presents enormous challenges due to its large coupling. Effective field theories, like the Skyrme model, are useful approaches to study properties of strong interaction at hadronic…
We study false vacuum decay for a gauged complex scalar field in a polynomial potential with nearly degenerate minima. Radiative corrections to the profile of the nucleated bubble as well as the full decay rate are computed in the planar…
Motivated by the discovery of a plenitude of metastable vacua in a string landscape and the possibility of rapid tunneling between these vacua, we revisit the dynamics of a false vacuum bubble in a background de Sitter spacetime. We find…
Some false vacua do not decay via bounces. This usually happens when a flat direction of the tunneling action due to scale invariance is lifted to a sloping valley by a scale breaking perturbation, pushing the bounce off to infinity. We…
The so-called Klein tunneling is re-examined within the framework of quantum field theory, but from a different point of view on the asymptotic states. We treat it as a one-dimensional scattering process of a fermion incident to a step…
The tunneling potential formalism makes it easy to construct exact solutions to the vacuum decay problem in potentials with multiple fields. While some exact solutions for single-field decays were known, we present the first nontrivial…
We present a fast and efficient method for studying vacuum stability constraints in multi-scalar theories beyond the Standard Model. This method is designed for a reliable use in large scale parameter scans. The minimization of the scalar…
We address the long-standing puzzle of false vacuum decay catalyzed by black holes. Naively, small black holes with large Hawking temperatures can generate highly-boosted true vacuum bubbles in the early universe and trigger vacuum decay…
We study the possibility of forming the false vacuum bubble nucleated within the true vacuum background via the true-to-false vacuum phase transition in curved spacetime. We consider a semiclassical Euclidean bubble in the Einstein theory…
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 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…
In this work we show a class of oscillating configurations for the evolution of the domain walls in Euclidean space. The solutions are obtained analytically. Phase transitions are achieved from the associated fluctuation determinant, by the…
In a recent model of dark energy (with several phenomenological consequences), the universe is assumed to be trapped in a false vacuum with an energy density of the order of (10^{-3} eV)^4, mimicking the presently successful $\Lambda CDM$…
We discuss an exact false vacuum decay rate at one loop for a real and complex scalar field in a quartic-quartic potential with two tree-level minima. The bounce solution is used to compute the functional determinant from both fluctuations.…
A scalar field, $\eta({\bf r})$, is coupled to the skyrmion. Its classical value in the vacuum ("condensate") reduces to the pion decay constant, $f_{\pi}$, being thus proportional to the chiral condensate $<\bar{q} q>$. A quadratic…
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…
Under the assumption that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
We use some exact results in the scalar field theory to revise the analysis by Coleman and Callan about the false vacuum decay and propose a simple non-perturbative formalism. We introduce exact Green's function which incorporates…