Related papers: Bubble nucleation at zero and nonzero temperatures
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…
One possible way in which phase transitions in the early universe may have ocurred is via nucleation of bubbles of the new phase (true vacuum) in the old phase (false vacuum). The technique most widely used to compute the probability of…
In this Letter, we numerically present the possibility of the first-order phase transition occurring through the thermal fluctuation in the early universe. We find that when the temperature is slightly higher than the mass scale of the…
False vacuum decay in quantum mechanical first order phase transitions is a phenomenon with wide implications in cosmology, and presents interesting theoretical challenges. In the standard approach, it is assumed that false vacuum decay…
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…
Temperature plays a crucial role in metastable phenomena, not only by contributing to determine the state (phase) of a system, but also ruling the decay probability to more stable states. Such a situation is encountered in many different…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
Ultracold atomic gases can undergo phase transitions that mimic relativistic vacuum decay, allowing us to empirically test early-Universe physics in tabletop experiments. We investigate the physics of these analog systems, going beyond…
In quantum field theory, the decay of an extended metastable state into the real ground state is known as ``false vacuum decay'' and it takes place via the nucleation of spatially localized bubbles. Despite the large theoretical effort to…
Metastable `false' vacuum states are an important feature of the Standard Model of particle physics and many theories beyond it. Describing the dynamics of a phase transition out of a false vacuum via the nucleation of bubbles is essential…
We investigate a new mechanism for the cosmological QCD phase transition: inhomogeneous nucleation. The primordial temperature fluctuations, measured to be $\delta T/T \sim 10^{-5}$, are larger than the tiny temperature interval, in which…
We investigate rarely explored details of supercooled cosmological first-order phase transitions at the electroweak scale, which may lead to strong gravitational wave signals or explain the cosmic baryon asymmetry. The nucleation…
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…
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…
We study the possibility of forming the false vacuum bubble nucleated within the true vacuum background via the true-to-false vacuum phase transition in curved spacetime. We consider a semiclassical Euclidean bubble in the Einstein theory…
In this work we theoretically investigate the false vacuum decay process in a ferromagnetic quantum spin-1/2 chain. We develop a many-body theory describing the nucleation and the coherent dynamics of true-vacuum bubbles that is…
Despite being at the heart of the theory of the "Big Bang" and cosmic inflation, the quantum field theory prediction of false vacuum tunneling has not been tested. To address the exponential complexity of the problem, a table-top quantum…
Liquid helium under negative pressures represents a unique possibility for studying nucleation and growth dynamics of cavities at low temperatures down to absolute zero. We analyze the growth dynamics of cavities and determine the…
The nucleation and evolution of bubbles are investigated in the model of an $O(3)$-symmetric scalar field coupled to gravity in the high temperature limit. It is shown that, in addition to the well-known bubble of which the inside region is…
We study the decay of a thermally excited metastable vacuum in classical field theory using real-time numerical simulations. We find a significantly lower decay rate than predicted by standard thermal theory at moderate temperatures,…