Related papers: Bubble nucleation at zero and nonzero temperatures
The decay of metastable 'false vacuum' states via bubble nucleation plays a crucial role in many cosmological scenarios. Cold-atom analog experiments will soon provide the first empirical probes of this process, with potentially…
Quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a false vacuum is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory. It is relevant to models of the early Universe, where the nucleation of bubbles gives rise to an inflationary universe and the…
The quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a metastable state ("false vacuum decay") is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory and cosmology. This occurs via local formation of bubbles of true vacuum with their subsequent…
The dynamics of phase transitions plays a crucial r\^ole in the so-called interface between high energy particle physics and cosmology. Many of the interesting results generated during the last fifteen years or so rely on simplified…
We study the dynamics of cosmological phase transitions in the case of small velocities of bubble walls, $v_w<0.1$. We discuss the conditions in which this scenario arises in a physical model, and we compute the development of the phase…
In quantum field theory (QFT), the "vacuum" is not just empty space but the lowest-energy state of a quantum field. If the energy landscape has multiple local minima, the local ground states are the false vacuum (FV) which can tunnel…
We discuss recent progress (and controversies) in the theory of finite temperature phase transitions. This includes the structure of the effective potential at a finite temperature, the infrared problem in quantum statistics of gauge…
In certain special circumstances, such as in the vicinity of a black hole or in a uniformly accelerating frame, vacuum fluctuations appear to give rise to a finite-temperature environment. This effect, currently without experimental…
The concept of negative temperatures has occasionally been used in connection with quantum systems. A recent example of this sort is reported in the paper of S. Braun et al. [Science 339,52 (2013)], where an attractively interacting…
In the traditional view a cosmic first-order phase transition cannot occur without nucleating handful of bubbles in the entire Hubble volume. The presence of domain walls during the transition may, however, significantly alter the dynamics…
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 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…
We construct the thermal bounce solution in holographic models that describes first-order phase transitions between the deconfined and confined phases in strongly-coupled gauge theories. This new, periodic Euclidean solution represents…
We quantize subcritical bubbles which are formed in the weakly first order phase transition. We find that the typical size of the thermal fluctuation reduces in the quantum-statistical physics. We estimate the typical size and the amplitude…
In the context of false vacuum decay at zero temperature, it is well known that bubbles expand with uniform proper acceleration. We show that this uniformly accelerating expansion suffers from an instability related to the bubble size. This…
Blocking transformation is performed in quantum field theory at finite temperature. It is found that the manner temperature deforms the renormalized trajectories can be used to understand better the role played by the quantum fluctuations.…
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. These lecture notes provide an…
The liquid-gas phase transition in finite nuclei is studied in a heated liquid-drop model where the nuclear drop is assumed to be in thermodynamic equilibrium with its own evaporated nucleonic vapor conserving the total baryon number and…
In a recent trilogy we proposed a Statistical Theory of General Relativity spacetime. Here we apply our new theory to determine the (energy) ``density'' and (virial) ``temperature'' dependence of the structure of the spacetime quantum…
A quantum system can undergo a continuous phase transition at the absolute zero of temperature as some parameter entering its Hamiltonian is varied. These transitions are particularly interesting for, in contrast to their classical finite…