Related papers: The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple
We revisit the famous Coleman-de Luccia formalism for decay of false vacuum in gravitational theory. Since the corresponding wave function is time-independent we argue that its instanton's interpretation as the decay rate probability is…
There is a single negative mode in the spectrum of small perturbations about the tunneling solutions describing a metastable vacuum decay in flat spacetime. This mode is needed for consistent description of decay processes. When gravity is…
We derive the leading quantum corrections to the gravitational potentials in a de Sitter background, due to the vacuum polarization from loops of conformal fields. Our results are valid for arbitrary conformal theories, even strongly…
It has been recently shown that, contrary to an intuitive decoupling argument, the presence of new physics at very large energy scales (say around the Planck scale) can have a strong impact on the electroweak vacuum lifetime. In particular,…
I have calculated the exponential suppression factor in the decay rate of the false vacuum (per unit volume) for a real scalar field at finite temperature, in the presence of gravity, in the thin-wall approximation. Temperatures are assumed…
We compute the quantum gravitational contributions to the standard model effective potential and analyze their effects on the Higgs vacuum stability in the framework of effective field theory. Non-renormalizability of Einstein gravity…
We investigate false vacuum decay of a relativistic scalar field initialized in the metastable minimum of an asymmetric double-well potential. The transition to the true ground state is a well-defined initial-value problem in real time,…
We study scenarios where a scalar field has a spatially varying vacuum expectation value such that the total field variation is super-Planckian. We focus on the case where the scalar field controls the coupling of a U(1) gauge field, which…
Gravity and general relativity are considered as an Effective Field Theory at low energies and macroscopic distances. The effective action of the conformal anomaly of light or massless quantum fields has significant effects on macroscopic…
In the presence of a gravitational field decay rates may significantly differ from flat space equivalent. By studying mutually interacting quantum fields the decay rates can be calculated on a given spacetime. This paper presents the…
Quantum transitions among de Sitter and Minkowski spacetimes through bubble nucleation are revisited using the Hamiltonian formalism. We interpret tunnelling probabilities as relative probabilities: the ratio of the squared wave functionals…
We consider a wave-function approach to the false vacuum decay with gravity and present a new method to calculate the tunneling amplitude under the WKB approximation. The result agrees with the one obtained by the Euclidean path-integral…
The positive energy theorem precludes the possibility of Minkowski flat space decaying by any mechanism. In certain circumstances, however, large quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field could arise---not only at the Planck scale,…
The 'thin-wall approximation' gives a simple estimate of the decay rate of an unstable quantum field. Unfortunately, the approximation is uncontrolled. In this paper I show that there are actually two different thin-wall approximations and…
A spatially flat Robertson-Walker spacetime driven by a cosmological constant is non-conformally coupled to a massless scalar field. The equations of semiclassical gravity are explicitly solved for this case, and a self-consistent de Sitter…
The weak field approximation in a model of de Sitter gravity is investigated in the static and spherically symmetric case, under the assumption that the vacuum spacetime without perturbations from matter fields is a torsion-free de Sitter…
A new form of quasiclassical space-time dynamics for constrained systems reveals how quantum effects can be derived systematically from canonical quantization of gravitational systems. These quasiclassical methods lead to additional fields,…
Standard General Relativity assumes that, in the absence of classical matter sources, spacetime is empty. This chapter considers and analyses the new behaviours of the gravitational field that appear when one substitutes this emptiness by a…
It is challenging to construct explicit and controllable models that realize de Sitter solutions in string compactifications. This difficulty is the main motivation for the Refined de Sitter Conjecture and the Trans-Planckian Censorship…
It is believed that gravity will be explained in the framework of the existing quantum theory when one succeeds in eliminating divergencies at large momenta or small distances (although the phenomenon of gravity has been observed only at…