Related papers: Vacuum decay in the Lorentzian path integral
We study the possibility of forming the false vacuum bubble nucleated within the true vacuum background via the true-to-false vacuum phase transition in curved spacetime. We consider a semiclassical Euclidean bubble in the Einstein theory…
We investigate false vacuum decay of a relativistic scalar field initialized in the metastable minimum of an asymmetric double-well potential. The transition to the true ground state is a well-defined initial-value problem in real time,…
Using state-of-the-art rare-event sampling simulations, we precisely characterize the nucleation of liquid droplets from a supersaturated Lennard-Jones gas and uncover a key physical feature: critical clusters nucleate with a density that…
We prove optimal decay estimates for positive solutions to elliptic p-Laplacian problems in the entire Euclidean space, when a critical nonlinearity with a decaying source term is considered. Also gradient decay estimates are furnished. Our…
We consider any pseudo holomorphic integral 2-cycle in an arbitrary almost complex manifold and perform a blow up analysis at an arbitrary point. Building upon a pseudo algebraic blow up (previously introduced by the author) we prove a…
The quantum decay of a metastable vacuum is exponentially suppressed by a tunneling action that can be calculated in the semi-classical approximation as the Euclidean action of a bounce that interpolates between the false and true phases.…
The tunneling potential method to calculate the action for vacuum decay is an alternative to the Euclidean bounce method that has a number of attractive features. In this paper we extend the formalism to general spacetime dimension $d>2$…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
We present a generalization to the N-dimensional case for the nucleation coefficient of a spherical p-brane, separating two (anti-)de Sitter spacetimes. We use a semiclassical approximation based on the analytical continuation to the…
The Feynman path integral has revolutionized modern approaches to quantum physics. Although the path integral formalism has proven very successful and spawned several approximation schemes, the direct evaluation of real-time path integrals…
The tunneling potential formalism, an alternative to the standard Coleman Euclidean approach, offers in a natural way a unified view of vacuum decays. In particular, I show in this talk how Coleman's bounce is just a member of a continuous…
In these lecture notes, I describe the motivation behind a recent formulation of a non-perturbative gravitational path integral for Lorentzian (instead of the usual Euclidean) space-times, and give a pedagogical introduction to its main…
The false vacuum decay in field theory from a coherently oscillating initial state is studied for $\phi^6$ potential. An oscillating bubble solution is obtained. The instantaneous bubble nucleation rate is calculated.
The decay of metastable 'false vacuum' states via bubble nucleation plays a crucial role in many cosmological scenarios. Cold-atom analog experiments will soon provide the first empirical probes of this process, with potentially…
Direct numerical evaluation of the real-time path integral has a well-known sign problem that makes convergence exponentially slow. One promising remedy is to use Picard-Lefschetz theory to flow the domain of the field variables into the…
As originally described by Rubakov, particles are produced during the tunneling of a metastable quantum field. We propose to extend his formalism to compute the backreaction of these particles on the semiclassical decay probability of the…
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…
We construct a combined non-perturbative path integral over geometries and topologies for two-dimensional Lorentzian quantum gravity. The Lorentzian structure is used in an essential way to exclude geometries with unacceptably large…
An Euclidean bounce describing vacuum decay can be considered as an infinite stack of concentric thin shells to which a thin-wall action can be assigned. The integral over all shells produces then a tunneling action that is precisely the…
Nucleation in supersaturated vapor is investigated with two series of molecular dynamics simulations in the canonical ensemble. The applied methods are: (a) analysis of critical nuclei at moderate supersaturations by simulating equilibria…