Related papers: Instanton Expansions and Phase Transitions
We consider a (1+1) dimensional scalar field theory that supports oscillons, which are localized, oscillatory, stable solutions to nonlinear equations of motion. We study this theory in an expanding background and show that oscillons now…
We examine the contribution of small instantons to the axion mass in various UV completions of QCD. We show that the reason behind the potential dominance of such contributions is the non-trivial embedding of QCD into the UV theory. The…
We examine the role of instantons in the zero-temperature chiral phase transition in an SU(N) gauge theory. For a range of N_f (the number of fermion flavors) depending on N, the theory exhibits an infrared fixed point at coupling…
We study an interacting ensemble of instantons at finite baryon chemical potential. We emphasize the importance of fermionic zero modes and calculate the fermion induced interaction between instantons at non-zero chemical potential. We show…
Ring-polymer instanton theory has been developed to simulate the quantum dynamics of molecular systems at low temperatures. Chemical reaction rates can be obtained by locating the dominant tunneling pathway and analyzing fluctuations around…
The dynamical behavior of tachyon field with an inverse potential is investigated in loop quantum cosmology. It reveals that the late time behavior of tachyon field with this potential leads to a power-law expansion. In addition, an…
If the Hartle-Hawking wave function is the correct boundary condition of our universe, the history of our universe will be well approximated by an instanton. Although this instanton should be classicalized at infinity, as long as we are…
An axion background field induces tiny oscillating electric and magnetic fields in an external static magnetic field. This signature is used to search for axion dark matter. We use standard quantum field theory techniques to obtain an…
Instanton theory has arisen as a practical tool for calculating tunneling splittings in molecular systems. Unfortunately, the original formulation of instanton theory fundamentally breaks down when trying to calculate the level splitting in…
Instanton effects may have implications for hadronization of quark-gluon plasma as it cools. Here we study dispersion relations of mesons in a strongly coupled plasma with an instanton background present. It will be shown that at higher…
We consider specific quantum mechanical model problems for which perturbation theory fails to explain physical properties like the eigenvalue spectrum even qualitatively, even if the asymptotic perturbation series is augmented by…
A new classical solution for the Yang-Mills theory in which the Euclidean energy plays a role of a parameter is discussed. The instanton and sphaleron are shown to be particular examples of this more general solution. The energy parameter…
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 show that in imaginary time quantum metric fluctuations of empty space form a self-consistent de Sitter gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling from "nothing" into de Sitter space of real time (no…
Axions are light pseudoscalar bosons postulated with many motivations in particle physics and cosmology, including the strong CP problem and the dark matter in our Universe. In this lecture notes, we discuss a variety of known ultraviolet…
We present a new mechanism to relax the initial misalignment angle of the QCD axion and raise the cosmological bound on the axion decay constant. The QCD axion receives a contribution from small UV instantons during inflation, which raises…
We present a functional method to perform complete one-instanton calculations of the axion potential. This is done for an $SU(N)$ gauge theory with a matter content in any representation of the gauge group. This type of computation requires…
We study the effects of instantons on the charged pion electro-magnetic formfactor at intermediate momenta. In the Single Instanton Approximation (SIA), we predict the pion formfactor in the kinematic region Q^2=2-15 GeV^2. By developing…
In both Yang-Mills theories and sigma models, instantons are endowed with degrees of freedom associated to their scale size and orientation. It has long been conjectured that these degrees of freedom have a dual interpretation as the…
We analyze the instanton transitions in the framework of the gauge invariant variational calculation in the pure Yang-Mills theory. Instantons are identified with the saddle points in the integration over the gauge group which projects the…