Related papers: Instanton Expansions and Phase Transitions
Equilibrium rate theories play a crucial role in understanding rare, reactive events. However, they are inapplicable to a range of irreversible processes in systems driven far from thermodynamic equilibrium like active and biological…
Glass-forming liquids exhibit a dramatic dynamical slowdown as the temperature is lowered. This can be attributed to relaxation proceeding via large structural rearrangements whose characteristic size increases as the system cools. These…
A characterization of instanton contributions to gauge field theory is given. The dynamics of instantons with the gluon field is given in terms of 'classical' instanton contributions, i.e. on the same footing as tree amplitudes in field…
In particle physics, axions and axion-like particles are ubiquitous. Remarkably, ultra-light axions could constitute dark matter or dark energy. Therefore, it is important to detect axions experimentally. In the presence of a magnetic…
We present a simple set of power counting rules which allows us to easily estimate calculable instanton effects up to $O(1)$ factors. We apply the resulting Instanton NDA to examine the effects of small instantons on various axion models.…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking and elementary excitation are two of the pillars of condensed matter physics that are closely related to each other. The symmetry and its spontaneous breaking not only control the dynamics and spectrum of…
The Axion Weak Gravity Conjecture provides one of the most effective quantum gravity tools for constraining particle physics and cosmology, but it has long been thought of as a slightly fuzzy statement: given an axion with decay constant…
We investigate the role of gauge and gravitational instantons in the context of the Swampland program. Our focus is on the global symmetry breaking they induce, especially in the presence of fermions. We first recall and make more precise…
The warm inflation scenario is an alternative mechanism which can explain the isotropic and homogeneous Universe which we are living in. In this work I extend a previously introduced formalism, without the restriction of slow - roll regime.…
{(Anti-)instanton behaviour in Euclidean non-abelian field of the point-like source is studied by analyzing the possible (anti-)instanton deformations as resulted from the variations of its characteristic parameters. The variational…
The aim of this review is to demonstrate that there exists a coherent picture of strong interactions, based on instantons. Starting from the first principles of QCD - via the microscopic mechanism of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking -…
Post-Newtonian theory is considered a reliable effective expansion of General Relativity in the weak-field and slow-motion limit. We argue that such a belief is misplaced. In generic many-body relativistic dynamics, the absence of globally…
We calculate exactly functional determinants for quantum oscillations about periodic instantons with non-trivial value of the Polyakov line at spatial infinity. Hence, we find the weight or the probability with which calorons with…
Axions play a central role in inflationary model building and other cosmological applications. This is mainly due to their flat potential, which is protected by a global shift symmetry. However, quantum gravity is known to break global…
If the inflaton is a pseudo-scalar axion, the axion shift symmetry can protect the flatness of its potential from too large radiative corrections. This possibility, known as natural inflation, requires an axion scale which is greater than…
We investigate the production of axion quanta during the early universe evolution of an axion-like field rolling down a wiggly potential. We compute the growth of quantum fluctuations and their back-reaction on the homogeneous zero-mode. We…
We discuss duality between the linear and chiral dilaton formulations, in the presence of super-Yang-Mills instanton corrections to the effective action. In contrast to previous work on the subject, our approach appeals directly to explicit…
During inflation an axion field coupled to a gauge field through a Chern-Simons term can trigger the production of gauge quanta due to a tachyonic instability. The amplification of the gauge field modes exponentially depends on the velocity…
Instanton is known to exist in Euclidean spacetime only. Their role in real time dynamics is usually understood as tunneling effect by Wick rotation. We illustrate other effects of instanton in holography by investigating 5d effective…
We consider forced tunneling in QCD, described semiclassically by instanton-antiinstanton field configurations. By separating topologically different minima we obtain details of the effective potential and study the turning states, which…