Related papers: Tunneling Without Bounce
We study quantum mechanical tunneling using complex solutions of the classical field equations. Simple visualization techniques allow us to unify and generalize previous treatments, and straightforwardly show the connection to the standard…
We find the novel effect on the decay of a false vacuum in view of quantum field theory, which is induced by a field coupling to the scalar field related to a first-order phase transition. This effect of the environment can never be…
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…
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…
The decay rates of quasistable states in quantum field theories are usually calculated using instanton methods. Standard derivations of these methods rely in a crucial way upon deformations and analytic continuations of the physical…
Tunneling half lives are obtained in a minimalistic deformation picture of nuclear decays. As widely documented in other deformation models, one finds that the effective mass of the nucleus changes with the deformation parameter. However,…
We investigate the bounce solutions in vacuum decay problems. We show that it is possible to have a stable false vacuum in a potential that is unbounded from below.
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 tunneling between two potential wells in a magnetic field can be strongly increased when the potential barrier varies in the direction perpendicular to the line connecting the two wells and remains constant along this line. An…
The tunneling wave function of the universe is investigated in a minisuperspace framework of a de Sitter universe with a quantum scalar field, treated as a perturbation. We consider three different approaches to defining the tunneling wave…
Tunneling is a fascinating aspect of quantum mechanics that renders the local minima of a potential meta-stable, with important consequences for particle physics, for the early hot stage of the universe, and more speculatively, for the…
We revisit the formalism for tunneling in quantum field theory developed by Coleman and collaborators. In particular using the generalization of WKB methods for tunneling in quantum mechanics we avoid the problems with negative eigenvalues…
The extremely small probability of tunneling through an almost classical potential barrier may become not small under the action of the specially adapted non-stationary signal which selects the certain particle energy E_R. For particle…
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…
The periodic bounce configurations responsible for quantum tunneling are obtained explicitly and are extended to the finite energy case for minisuperspace models of the Universe. As a common feature of the tunneling models at finite energy…
We allow a scalar field on a flat FLRW background metric to tunnel between two degenerate vacua. The resulting true vacuum state then violates the Null Energy Condition, and the corresponding homogeneous fluid induces a bounce, after which…
The catastrophic decay of a spacetime with compact dimensions, via bubbles of nothing (BoNs), is probably a generic phenomenon. BoNs admit a 4-dimensional description as singular Coleman-de Luccia bounces of the size modulus field,…
We study the problem of false vacuum decay in arbitrary dimensions, in the presence of gravity, and compute the transition probability within the thin-wall approximation, generalising the results of Coleman and de Luccia. In the particular…
Motivated by cosmological examples we study quantum field theoretical tunnelling from an initial state where the "classical field", i.e. the vacuum expectation value of the field operator is spatially homogeneous but performing a…
This paper presents a simple framework that organizes thin-wall Coleman-De Luccia instantons based on the Euclidean geometries of their original and tunneled vacuum patches. We consider all a priori allowed vacuum pairs (de Sitter or…