Related papers: Probing thermal fluctuations through scalar test p…
The principle of microscopic reversibility lies at the core of fluctuation theorems, which have extended our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics to the statistical level. In the quantum regime, however, this elementary…
We consider, in de Sitter spacetime, both freely falling and static two-level atoms in interaction with a conformally coupled massless scalar field in the de Sitter-invariant vacuum, and separately calculate the contributions of vacuum…
Weak first-order phase transitions proceed with percolation of new phase. The kinematics of this process is clarified from the point of view of subcritical bubbles. We examine the effect of small subcritical bubbles around a large domain of…
An uniformly accelerated (Rindler) observer will detect particles in the Minkowski vacuum, known as Unruh effect. The spectrum is thermal and the temperature is given by that of the Killing horizon, which is proportional to the…
We study the response of a scalar thermal field to a $\delta$-probe in the context of non-local ghost-free theories. In these theories a non-local form factor is inserted into the kinetic part of the action which does not introduce new…
Quantum fluctuations are believed to play an important role in the thermalization of classical fields in inflationary cosmology but their relevance for isotropization/thermalization of the classical fields produced in heavy ion collisions…
We study the effect of dissipation on quantum phase fluctuations in d-wave superconductors. Dissipation, arising from a nonzero low frequency optical conductivity which has been measured in experiments below $T_c$, has two effects: (1) a…
The influence of the environment in the thermal equilibrium properties of a bipartite continuous variable quantum system is studied. The problem is treated within a system-plus-reservoir approach. The considered model reproduces the…
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…
Vacuum fluctuations play a central role in spontaneous emission. Recently, it has been suggested that these fluctuations could also be fundamental in the absorption dynamics, breaking the superposition inherent to the linear quantum…
Vacuum field fluctuations exert a radiation pressure which induces mechanical effects on scatterers. The question naturally arises whether the energy of vacuum fluctuations gives rise to inertia and gravitation in agreement with the general…
The Brownian motion of a test particle interacting with a quantum scalar field in the presence of a perfectly reflecting boundary is studied in (1 + 1)-dimensional flat spacetime. Particularly, the expressions for dispersions in velocity…
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 fluctuations of the stress tensor for a massless scalar field in two and four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime in the vacuum state. Covariant expressions for the stress tensor correlation function are obtained as sums of…
We present a novel source of dark energy, which is motivated by the prevalence of hidden sectors in string theory models and is consistent with all of the proposed swampland conjectures. Thermal effects hold a light hidden sector scalar at…
We consider the effect of a thermal bath on quantum correlations induced by the gravitational interaction in the weak field limit between two massive cat states, called gravitational cat (gravcat) states. The main goal of this paper is to…
There are good indications that fundamental physics gives rise to a modified space-momentum uncertainty relation that implies the existence of a minimum length scale. We implement this idea in the scalar field theory that describes density…
Coarse-grained Langevin-type effective field equations are derived for classical systems of particles. These equations include the effects of thermal fluctuation and dissipation which may arise from coupling to an external bath, as in the…
An accelerated particle sees the Minkowski vacuum as thermally excited, and the particle moves stochastically due to an interaction with the thermal bath. This interaction fluctuates the particle's transverse momenta like the Brownian…
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…