Related papers: Probing thermal fluctuations through scalar test p…
The effects of fluctuating boundaries on a superposition state of a quantum particle in a box is studied. We consider a model in one space dimension in which the initial state is a coherent superposition of two energy eigenstates. The…
Cosmological first-order phase transitions are a well-motivated source of stochastic gravitational waves (GWs), but most predictions are made based on the highly idealized model of perfectly spherical vacuum bubbles, neglecting thermal…
The nonzero ground-state energy of the quantum mechanical harmonic oscillator implies quantum fluctuations around the minimum of the potential with the mean square value proportional to Planck's constant. In classical mechanics thermal…
We examine vacuum fluctuations in theories with modified dispersion relations which represent dimensional reduction at high energies. By changing units of energy and momentum we can obtain a description rendering the dispersion relations…
We study the process of heat transfer through an entangled pair of two-level system, demonstrating the role of quantum correlations in this nonequilibrium process. While quantum correlations generally degrade with increasing the temperature…
Quantum phase fluctuations play a crucial role in low dimensional systems. In particular they prevent true long range phase order from forming in one dimensional condensates, even at zero temperature. Nevertheless, by dynamically splitting…
We investigate the metastability of scalar fields in quantum field theories at finite temperature, focusing on a detailed understanding of the bounce solution. At finite temperature, the bounce solution depends on two variables: the…
Fluctuations of local fields cause decoherence of quantum objects. It is generally believed that at high temperatures, thermal noises are much stronger than quantum fluctuations unless the thermal effects are suppressed by certain…
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…
The existence of irreducible field fluctuations in vacuum is an important prediction of quantum theory. These fluctuations have many observable consequences, like the Casimir effect which is now measured with good accuracy and agreement…
A large number of multifaceted quantum transport processes in molecular systems and physical nanosystems can be treated in terms of quantum relaxation processes which couple to one or several fluctuating environments. A thermal equilibrium…
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,…
In this paper, we calculate the spectrum of scalar field fluctuations in a bouncing, asymptotically flat Universe, and investigate the dependence of the result on changes in the physics on length scales shorter than the Planck length which…
Ultracold polar molecules, in highly anisotropic traps and interacting via a repulsive dipolar potential, may form one-dimensional chains at high densities. According to classical theory, at low temperatures there exists a critical value of…
We analyze the thermal fluctuations of a free, conformally invariant, Maxwell quantum field (photon) interacting with a cosmological background spacetime, in the framework of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes and semiclassical and…
A mirror in vacuum is coupled to fluctuating quantum fields. As a result, its energy-momentum and mass fluctuate. We compute the correlation spectra of force and mass fluctuations for a mirror at rest in vacuum (of a scalar field in a…
Real scalar field models incorporating asymmetric double well potentials will decay to the state of lowest energy. While the eventual nature of the system can be discerned, the determination of the dynamics of the bubble wall provides many…
The concept of weak invariants has recently been introduced in the context of conserved quantities in finite-time processes in nonequilibrium quantum thermodynamics. A weak invariant itself has a time-dependent spectrum, but its expectation…
The mechanism of thermal inflation, a relatively short period of accelerated expansion after primordial inflation, is a desirable ingredient for a certain class of particle physics models if they are not to be in contention with the…
We study the combined effect of thermal and quantum fluctuations in a zero dimensional superconductor. By using path integral techniques, we obtain novel expressions for the partition function and the superconducting order parameter which…