Related papers: Vacuum Decay in Real Time and Imaginary Time Forma…
We investigate the formation via tunneling of inflating (false-vacuum) bubbles in a true-vacuum background, and the reverse process. Using effective potentials from the junction condition formalism, all true- and false-vacuum bubble…
Picard--Lefschetz theory is applied to path integrals of quantum mechanics, in order to compute real-time dynamics directly. After discussing basic properties of real-time path integrals on Lefschetz thimbles, we demonstrate its…
The false vacuum decay has been a central theme in physics for half a century with applications to cosmology and to the theory of fundamental interactions. This fascinating phenomenon is even more intriguing when combined with the…
Using the squeezed state formalism the coherent state representation of quantum fluctuations in an expanding universe is derived. It is shown that this provides a useful alternative to the Wigner function as a phase space representation 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…
We consider the possibility that tunneling in a degenerate double-well potential in de Sitter spacetime leads to coherent oscillations of quantum probability to find the system in a given well. We concentrate on the case when the mass scale…
The quantum decay of a metastable vacuum is exponentially suppressed by a tunneling action that can be calculated in the semi-classical approximation as the Euclidean action of a bounce that interpolates between the false and true phases.…
We investigate quantum tunneling in smooth symmetric and asymmetric double-well potentials. Exact solutions for the ground and first excited states are used to study the dynamics. We introduce Wigner's quasi-probability distribution…
Time it takes to travel from one position to another, devoid of any quantum mechanical description, has been modeled variously, especially for quantum tunneling. The model time, if universally valid, must be subluminal, must hold everywhere…
The imaginary part of the one loop effective action in external backgrounds can be efficiently computed using worldline instantons which are closed periodic paths in spacetime. Exact solutions for nonstatic backgrounds are only known in…
We study the dynamics of multi-dimensional quantum tunneling by introducing a complex absorbing potential to a two-dimensional model for spontaneous fission. We fist diagonalize the Hamiltonian with the complex potential to determine a…
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 $d>2$…
We examine the visualization of quantum mechanics in phase space by means of the Wigner function and the Wigner function flow as a complementary approach to illustrating quantum mechanics in configuration space by wave functions. The Wigner…
The anti self-adjoint operators of coordinate and momentum are introduced and applied in discussion of tunneling through the potential barrier where imaginary value of momentum unavoidably appears. Tunneling through temporal barrier is…
We consider tunneling processes in QFT induced by collisions of elementary particles. We propose a semiclassical method for estimating the probability of these processes in the limit of very high collision energy. As an illustration, we…
The complex-time formalism is developed in the framework of the path-integral formalism, to be used for analysis of the quantum tunneling phenomena. We show that subleading complex-time saddle-points do not account for the right WKB result.…
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…
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…
Moving detectors in relativistic quantum field theories reveal the fundamental entangled structure of the vacuum which manifests, for instance, through its thermal character when probed by a uniformly accelerated detector. In this paper, we…
We consider the quantum creation of a closed universe within the Euclidean path-integral formalism. An analytical expression for the tunneling probability is derived, including both the exponential suppression and the exact Gaussian…