Related papers: Instanton Expansions and Phase Transitions
Instantons are tunneling solutions that connect two vacua, and under a small change in the potential, instantons sometimes disappear. We classify these disappearances as smooth (decay rate goes to 0 at disappearance) or abrupt (decay rate…
Phase Transition is associated with a drastic change in some observable (ordered parameter) of the system when the controlled parameter is tuned smoothly. Lee-Yang theory of phase transition is discussed which is related to the accumulation…
Non-abelian gauge theories can be cast into abelian gauge theories with monopoles. We ask what becomes of the instantons after abelian projection. Instantons are found to consist of closed dyon loops. It is shown that the electric charge of…
A gauge theory model in which there exists a specific interaction between instantons is considered. An effective action describing this interaction possesses a minimum when the instantons have identical orientation. The considered…
Certain quantum mechanical potentials give rise to a vanishing perturbation series for at least one energy level (which as we here assume is the ground state), but the true ground-state energy is positive. We show here that in a typical…
We show that axions interacting with abelian gauge fields obtain a potential from loops of magnetic monopoles. This is a consequence of the Witten effect: the axion field causes the monopoles to acquire an electric charge and alters their…
We discuss quantum gravitational effects in Einstein theory coupled to periodic axion scalars to analyze the viability of several proposals to achieve superplanckian axion periods (aka decay constants) and their possible application to…
The existence of phantom energy in a universe which evolves to eventually show a big rip doomsday is a possibility which is not excluded by present observational constraints. In this letter it is argued that the field theory associated with…
It is shown that the field strength formulated Yang-Mills theory yields the same semiclassics as the standard formulation in terms of the gauge potential. This concerns the classical instanton solutions as well as the quantum fluctuations…
The electric Weak Gravity Conjecture demands that axions with large decay constant $f$ couple to light instantons. The resulting large instantonic corrections pose problems for natural inflation. We explore an alternative argument based on…
We show that the coherent axion field spontaneously decays by emitting axion particles via quantum tunneling if axion potential has more than one minimum. By employing the $\hbar$-expansion and mean field approximation, we develop a…
We propose a class of models exhibiting instanton crystal phase. In this phase, the minimum of the free energy corresponds to a configuration with an imaginary-time-dependent order parameter in a form of a chain of alternating instantons…
We investigate the axion inflation model derived by poly-instanton effects in type II superstring theories. Poly-instanton effects are instanton effects corrected by another instanton and it can generate the modulus-axion potential with the…
In string theory, the simultaneous existence of many Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) are suggested over a vast mass range, and a variety of potentials have been developed in the context of inflation. In such potentials shallower than quadratic,…
The axion mass receives a large correction from small instantons if the QCD gets strongly coupled at high energies. We discuss the size of the new CP violating phases caused by the fact that the small instantons are sensitive to the UV…
It is known that Yang-Mills theories, especially in the large-$N$ limit, exhibit a $\theta$-vacuum structure with a multi-branched vacuum energy. In this work, we demonstrate that this multi-branch structure can play a crucial role in axion…
We develop methods for resummation of instanton lattice series. Using these tools, we investigate the consequences of the Weak Gravity Conjecture for large-field axion inflation. We find that the Sublattice Weak Gravity Conjecture implies a…
In this note, we discuss the implications of the weak gravity conjecture (WGC) for general models of large-field inflation with a large number of axions $N$. We first show that, from the bottom-up perspective, such models admit a variety of…
Instanton theory relates the rate constant for tunneling through a barrier to the periodic classical trajectory on the upturned potential energy surface whose period is $\tau=\hbar/(k_{\rm B}T)$. Unfortunately, the standard theory is only…
We consider new instantons that appear as a result of accounting for quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations naturally regularize the O(4) singular solutions abandoned in Coleman's theory. In the previous works [3,4] we showed how new…