Related papers: Vacuum decay and quadratic gravity: the massive ca…
We study the thermodynamics of Einstein gravity with vanishing cosmological constant subjected to conformal boundary conditions. Our focus is on comparing the series of subextensive terms to predictions from thermal effective field theory,…
We investigate circularly symmetric static solutions in three-dimensional gravity with a minimally coupled massive scalar field. We integrate numerically the field equations assuming asymptotic flatness, where black holes do not exist and a…
Quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a false vacuum is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory. It is relevant to models of the early Universe, where the nucleation of bubbles gives rise to an inflationary universe and the…
I argue that the conventional field theoretic notion of vacuum state is not valid in quantum gravity. The arguments use gravitational effective field theory, as well as results from string theory, particularly the AdS/CFT correspondence.…
We study a set of static solutions of the Einstein equations in presence of a massless scalar field and establish their connection to the Kantowski-Sachs cosmological solutions based on some kind of duality transformations. The physical…
We explore the question of how to probe the vacuum structure of space time by a massive scalar field through interaction with background gravitons. Using the $\Gamma$-regularization for the in-/out-state formalism, we find the effective…
de Sitter space-time has a one complex parameter family of invariant vacua for the theory of a free, massive scalar field. For most of these vacua, in an interacting scalar theory the one loop corrections diverge linearly for large values…
We continue our work on the study of spherically symmetric loop quantum gravity coupled to two spherically symmetric scalar fields, one that acts as a clock. As a consequence of the presence of the latter, we can define a true Hamiltonian…
In the presence of a gravitational field decay rates may significantly differ from flat space equivalent. By studying mutually interacting quantum fields the decay rates can be calculated on a given spacetime. This paper presents the…
The decay rate of the Bunch-Davies state of a massive scalar field in the expanding flat spatial sections of de Sitter space is determined by an analysis of the particle pair creation process in real time. The Feynman definition of particle…
We consider a quantum scalar field in a classical (Euclidean) De Sitter background, whose radius is fixed dynamically by Einstein's equations. In the case of a free scalar, it has been shown by Becker and Reuter that if one regulates the…
Recently Gambini and Pullin proposed a new consistent discrete approach to quantum gravity and applied it to cosmological models. One remarkable result of this approach is that the cosmological singularity can be avoided in a general…
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…
We review a long-standing difficulty in some semiclassical models of vacuum and vacuum decay. Surprisingly enough these models, careless of their transparent formulation, are affected by, both, technical and conceptual issues. After proving…
Global topological defects described by real scalar field in (3,1) dimensions coupled to gravity are analyzed. We consider a class of scalar potentials with explicit dependence with distance, evading Derrick's theorem and leading to defects…
A consistency condition of general relativity as an effective field theory in Minkowskian background uniquely fixes the value of the cosmological constant. In two-loop calculations, including the interaction of gravitons with matter fields,…
Standard cosmology poses a number of important questions. Apart from its singular origin, it possesses early and late accelerating phases required to account for observations. The vacuum energy has been considered as a possible way to…
For the anisotropic Universe filled with massless vector field in the General Relativity frame we obtain bouncing solution for one of scale factors. We obtain the Universe with finite maximal energy density, finite value of…
We solve Einstein's equation with Robertson-Walker metric as an initial-value problem, using as the source of gravity a Halpern-Huang real scalar field, which was derived from renormalization-group analysis, with a potential that exhibits…
We generalize the scale invariant gravity by allowing a negative kinetic energy term for the classical scalar field. This gives birth to a new scalar-tensor theory of gravity, in which the scalar field is in fact an auxiliary field. For a…