Related papers: On bubble collisions in strongly supercooled phase…
In flat space and at finite temperature, there are two regimes of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. At low temperature, the decay proceeds through thermally-assisted tunneling described by periodic Euclidean solutions -- bounces…
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…
In the present thesis, the author reviews the physics of cosmological first-order phase transitions that may have occured shortly after the Big Bang. Such transitions proceed via the nucleation and expansion of true vacuum bubbles and give…
In the picture of eternal inflation as driven by a scalar potential with multiple minima, our observable universe resides inside one of many bubbles formed from transitions out of a false vacuum. These bubbles necessarily collide, upsetting…
A scenario for a quantum big crunch to big bang transition is proposed. We first clarify the similarities between this transition and the final stages of black hole evaporation. The black hole and the universe are thought of as quantum…
Cold atomic gases offer the prospect of simulating the physics of the very early universe in the laboratory. In the condensate phase, the gas is described by a field theory with key features of high energy particle theory. This paper…
In order to study the validity of analytical formulas used in the calculation of characteristic physical quantities related to vacuum bubbles, we conduct several numerical simulations of bubble kinematics in the context of cosmological…
We study the gravitational radiation produced by the collisions of bubble walls or thin fluid shells in cosmological phase transitions. Using the so-called envelope approximation, we obtain analytically the asymptotic behavior of the…
The collapses and revivals of a coherent matter wave field of interacting particles can serve as a sensitive interferometric probe of the interactions and the number statistics of the underlying quantum field. Here we show how the ability…
I present a numerical package (CosmoTransitions) for analyzing finite-temperature cosmological phase transitions driven by single or multiple scalar fields. The package analyzes the different vacua of a theory to determine their critical…
We study the physics of cold polar molecules loaded into an optical lattice in the regime of strong three-body interactions, as put forward recently by B\"uchler [Nature Phys. 3, 726 (2007)]. To this end quantum Monte Carlo simulations,…
We investigate the quantum phases of hard-core dipolar bosons confined to a square lattice in a bilayer geometry. Using exact theoretical techniques, we discuss the many-body effects resulting from pairing of particles across layers at…
We investigate the effects of vortex interaction on the formation of interference patterns in a coherent pair of two-dimensional Bose condensed clouds of ultra-cold atoms traveling in opposite directions subject to a harmonic trapping…
We investigate quantum tunneling in the theory of a complex scalar field with a global $U(1)$ symmetry when the charge density of the initial configuration does not vanish. We discuss the possible final configurations and set up the…
Confinement can have a considerable effect on the behavior of particle systems, and is therefore an effective way to discover new phenomena. A notable example is a system of identical bosons at low temperature under an external field…
We update predictions for the gravitational wave (GW) signal from a strongly supercooled phase transition in an illustrative classically conformal U(1)$_{B-L}$ model. We implement $\propto \gamma^2$ scaling of the friction on the bubble…
We show that a particular class of postrecombination phase transitions in the vacuum can lead to localized overdense regions on relatively small scales, roughly 10^6 to 10^10 M_sun, potentially interesting for the origin of large black hole…
It has recently been suggested that black holes may be described as condensates of weakly interacting gravitons at a critical point, exhibiting strong quantum effects. In this paper, we study a model system of attractive bosons in one…
Our local Hubble volume might be contained within a bubble that nucleated in a false vacuum with only two large spatial dimensions. We study bubble collisions in this scenario and find that they generate gravity waves, which are made…
We discuss the effects of quantum fluctuations on the properties of vortex lattices in rapidly rotating ultracold atomic gases. We develop a variational method that goes beyond the Bogoliubov theory by including the effects of interactions…