Related papers: Effective field theory approach to thermal bubble …
Vapor bubbles are formed in liquids by two mechanisms: evaporation (temperature above the boiling threshold) and cavitation (pressure below the vapor pressure). The liquid resists in these metastable (overheating and tensile, respectively)…
We study the Euclidean bounce action interpolating between a false and a true vacuum for a scalar field theory with various types of potential. We focus on the cases of a triangular, a square and a quadratic barrier, where the bounce action…
This paper presents a study of the applicability boundary of the well-known quantum field theory. Based on the results of black hole thermodynamics, it is shown that this boundary may be lying at a level of the energy scales much lower than…
We derive the coupled dynamics between the bubble wall and the plasma from first principles using nonequilibrium quantum field theory. The commonly used equation of motion of the bubble wall in the kinetic approach is shown to be…
Different formalisms used in the perturbative approach to Thermal Field Theory (TFT) are briefly reviewed. The rate of production of a virtual photon in a quark-gluon plasma is then discussed to illustrate some features of TFT before…
Blocking transformation is performed in quantum field theory at finite temperature. It is found that the manner temperature deforms the renormalized trajectories can be used to understand better the role played by the quantum fluctuations.…
We develop a novel framework for describing quantum fluctuations in field theory, with a focus on cosmological applications. Our method uniquely circumvents the use of operator/Hilbert-space formalism, instead relying on a systematic…
Classical nucleation theory is used to estimate the free-energy barrier to nucleation of the solid phase of particles interacting via a potential which has a short-ranged attraction. Due to the high interfacial tension between the fluid and…
A formalism is developed to calculate the bubble nucleation rate in theories where the symmetry breaking is by radiative corrections. Although to leading and next-to-leading order the result can be expressed in terms of the effective action…
We present and discuss, at a general level, new mathematical results on the spatial nonuniformity of thermal quantum fields coupled minimally to static background electromagnetic potentials. Two distinct examples are worked through in some…
Cosmological phase transitions proceed via the nucleation of bubbles that subsequently expand and collide. The resulting gravitational wave spectrum depends crucially on the bubble wall velocity. Microscopic calculations of this velocity…
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…
In this review article, we discuss the current status and future prospects of perturbation theory as a means of studying the equilibrium thermodynamic and near-equilibrium transport properties of deconfined QCD matter. We begin with a brief…
An effective field theory approach is developed for calculating the thermodynamic properties of a field theory at high temperature $T$ and weak coupling $g$. The effective theory is the 3-dimensional field theory obtained by dimensional…
The Bose-Einstein condensation of atoms can be conveniently formulated as a problem in thermal quantum field theory. There are many properties of the equilibrium system and its collective excitations that can be studied experimentally. The…
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…
This paper extends classical results by Langer and Kramers and combines them with modern methods from high-temperature field theory. Assuming Langevin dynamics, the end-product is an all-orders description of bubble-nucleation at high…
The valley structure associated with quantum meta-stability is examined. It is defined by the new valley equation, which enables consistent evaluation of the imaginary-time path-integral. We study the structure of this new valley equation…
Temperature plays a crucial role in metastable phenomena, not only by contributing to determine the state (phase) of a system, but also ruling the decay probability to more stable states. Such a situation is encountered in many different…
In this paper, we numerically study the impact heavy field degrees of freedom have on vacuum metastability in a toy model, with the aim of better understanding how the decoupling theorem extends to semiclassical processes. We observe that…