Related papers: Vacuum decay in quadratic gravity
The smallest classically stable Q-balls are, in fact, generically metastable: in quantum theory they decay into free particles via collective tunneling. We derive general semiclassical method to calculate the rate of this process in the…
The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting…
Cosmological issues of the gravitino production by the decay of a heavy scalar field $X$ are examined, assuming that the damped coherent oscillation of the scalar once dominates the energy of the universe. The coupling of the scalar field…
We consider a single real scalar field in flat spacetime with a polynomial potential up to $\phi^4$, that has a local minimum, the false vacuum, and a deeper global minimum, the true vacuum. When the vacua are almost degenerate we are in…
We analyze the dynamics of a homogeneous and isotropic universe in the Einstein--Cartan theory of gravity. The spin of fermions produces spacetime torsion that prevents gravitational singularities and replaces the big bang with a…
Einstein's field equations with variable gravitational and cosmological ``constant'' are considered in presence of perfect fluid for Bianchi type-I spacetime. Consequences of the four cases of the phenomenological decay of $\Lambda$ have…
We study the gravitational collapse of a massless scalar field within the effective scenario of loop quantum gravity. Classical singularity is avoided and replaced by a quantum bounce in this model. It is shown that, quantum gravity effects…
We present a model for a classical, non-singular bouncing cosmology without violation of the null energy condition (NEC). The field content is General Relativity plus a real scalar field with a canonical kinetic term and only…
Hybrid metric-Palatini gravity is a recent and novel approach to modified theories of gravity, which consists of adding to the metric Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian an f(R) term constructed a la Palatini. It was shown that the theory passes…
In his 2005 review, Gravity and the Thermodynamics of Horizons, Paddy suggested that a vacuum in thermal equilibrium with a bath of radiation should have a gradually diminishing energy. We work through the consequences of this scenario, and…
Some false vacua do not decay via bounces. This usually happens when a flat direction of the tunneling action due to scale invariance is lifted to a sloping valley by a scale breaking perturbation, pushing the bounce off to infinity. We…
Recently, the idea of taking ensemble average over gravity models has been introduced. Based on this idea, we study the ensemble average over (effectively) all the gravity models (constructed from Ricci scalar) dubbing the name…
We consider the possibility to produce a bouncing universe in the framework of scalar-tensor gravity models in which the scalar field potential may be negative, and even unbounded from below. We find a set of viable solutions with nonzero…
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 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…
The tunneling potential formalism, an alternative to the standard Coleman Euclidean approach, offers in a natural way a unified view of vacuum decays. In particular, I show in this talk how Coleman's bounce is just a member of a continuous…
We present a calculation of thick-wall Coleman-de-Luccia (CdL) bounces in the Standard Model effective potential in a de Sitter background. The calculation is performed including the effect of the bounce back-reaction on the metric, which…
In hep-th/0506040 we discussed a classically constrained model of gravity. This theory contains known solutions of General Relativity (GR), and admits solutions that are absent in GR. Here we study cosmological implications of some of these…
We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false-vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations…
We study a model that the entropy per particle in the universe is constant. The sources for the entropy are the particle creation and a lambda decaying term. We find exact solutions for the Einstein field equations and show the compatibilty…