Related papers: Vacuum Decay Induced by False Skyrmions
We study the process of thermal activation mediated by sphaleron transitions by analyzing the real-time dynamics of the decay out of equilibrium in a $1+1$ dimensional field theory with a metastable state. The situation considered is that…
We analyze vacuum tunneling in quantum field theory in a general formalism by using the Wigner representation. In the standard instanton formalism, one usually approximates the initial false vacuum state by an eigenstate of the field…
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…
The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting…
This paper suggests a model for a bubble universe using buildable false vacuum bubbles. We study the causal structures of collapsing false vacuum bubbles using double-null simulations. False vacuum bubbles violate the null energy condition…
The dynamics of false vacuum decay at the end of inflation is studied. It is shown that the creation of a new phase is mainly stimulated by temperature fluctuations. Moving walls of O(3)-symmetric bubbles weakly interact with their…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is developed, based on an analogy with a superconducting phaseshift in which free fermions coupled perturbatively to a weak gravitational field are in an unstable false vacuum state. The…
The small or zero cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, probably results from a macroscopic cancellation mechanism of the zero-point energies. However, nearby horizon surfaces any macroscopic mechanism is expected to result in imperfect…
We consider the possibility that dark matter and dark energy can be explained by the minimal KSVZ axion model. This is possible if the lowest energy metastable minimum of the scalar potential has zero energy density, which is possible in…
High-density fermion matter is meta-stable due to the anomalous non-conservation of baryon and lepton numbers in the electroweak theory. The meta-stable state decays by penetrating the sphaleron barrier separating topologically different…
Strong dynamical scaling violations exist in quenched two-dimensional systems with vector O(3) order parameters. These systems support non-singular topologically stable configurations (skyrmions). By tuning the stability of isolated…
In this work we propose an alternative scheme for an Emergent Universe scenario where the universe is initially in a static state supported by a scalar field located in a false vacuum. The universe begins to evolve when, by quantum…
Properties of unstable false vacuum states are analyzed from the point of view of the quantum theory of unstable states. Some of false vacuum states survive up to times when their survival probability has a non-exponential form. At times…
We present a theory of false vacuum decay induced by spherical nucleation seeds. The type of seed considered has a boundary characterised by surface energy terms. The theory applies to false vacuum decay at zero and finite temperatures.…
The experimental data, as well as theoretical considerations allow (and, in some cases, require) the Universe at present to rest in a false vacuum, whose approximate stability imposes constraints on the model parameters. Under very general…
Stable gravitating lumps with a false vacuum core surrounded by the true vacuum in a scalar field potential exist in the presence of fermions at the core. These objects may exist in the universe at various scales.
We develop a new method for estimating the decay probability of the false vacuum via regularized instantons. Namely, we consider the case where the potential is either unbounded from below or the second minimum corresponding to the true…
In the presence of fermionic matter the topologically distinct vacua of the standard model are metastable and can decay by tunneling through the sphaleron barrier. This process annihilates one fermion per doublet due to the anomalous…
Recent LHC results concerning the mass of the Higgs boson indicate that the vacuum in our Universe may be unstable. We analyze properties of unstable vacuum states from the point of view of the quantum theory of unstable states. From the…
We calculate finite-temperature corrections to the decay rate of a generic neutral (pseudo)scalar particle that decays into (pseudo)scalars or fermion-antifermion pairs. The ratio of the finite-temperature decay rate to the zero-temperature…