Related papers: The Boring Monopole
We recently investigated the nature of resonant tunnelling in standard scalar Quantum Field Theory, uncovering the conditions required for resonance. It was shown that whereas the homogeneous false vacuum may decay via bubble nucleation, it…
A standard approach to analyzing tunneling processes in various physical contexts is to use instanton or imaginary time path techniques. For systems in which the tunneling takes place in a time dependent setting, the standard methods are…
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 $d>2$…
We investigate the decay rate of a false vacuum state in de Sitter space at high Hubble rates, using two methods: the Hawking-Moss instanton method which is fully quantum mechanical but relies on the saddle-point approximation, and the…
We consider the question of whether cosmic ray catalysed false vacuum decay can be phenomenologically more important than spontaneous decay via quantum tunnelling. We extend the zero bubble wall width Landau-WKB analysis of catalysed false…
We propose a new solution to the cosmological monopole problem in which domain walls sweep away the magnetic monopoles and subsequently decay. The solution does not require extensive fine tuning or model building - it works for the…
Tunneling in quantum field theory is well understood in the case of a single scalar field. However, in theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking, one has to take into account the additional zero modes which appear due to the Goldstone…
We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…
Tunneling half lives are obtained in a minimalistic deformation picture of nuclear decays. As widely documented in other deformation models, one finds that the effective mass of the nucleus changes with the deformation parameter. However,…
The magnetic monopole in euclidean pure SU(2) gauge theory is investigated using a background field method on the lattice. With Monte Carlo methods we study the mass of the monopole in the full quantum theory. The monopole background under…
We present a simple and intuitive description of both, the Schwinger effect and false vacuum decay through bubble nucleation, as tunneling problems in one-dimensional relativistic quantum mechanics. Both problems can be described by an…
We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false-vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations…
Based on the study of saddle points of the potential energy landscapes of generic classical many-particle systems, we present a necessary criterion for the occurrence of a thermodynamic phase transition. Remarkably, this criterion imposes…
We investigate the advantages of machine learning techniques to recognize the dynamics of topological objects in quantum field theories. We consider the compact U(1) gauge theory in three spacetime dimensions as the simplest example of a…
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…
We calculate the false-vacuum decay rate in one-dimensional quantum mechanics on the basis of the saddle-point approximation in the Euclidean path integral at finite temperature. The saddle points are the finite-T and shifted bounce…
The false vacua of some potentials do not decay via Euclidean bounces. This typically happens for tunneling actions with a flat direction (in field configuration space) that is lifted by a perturbation into a sloping valley, pushing the…
We describe a new method which allows one to evaluate the false vacuum decay rate for a general potential which may depend on an arbitrary number of scalar fields.
In flat space and at finite temperature, there are two regimes of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. At low temperature, the decay proceeds through thermally-assisted tunneling described by periodic Euclidean solutions -- bounces…
We present a fast and efficient method for studying vacuum stability constraints in multi-scalar theories beyond the Standard Model. This method is designed for a reliable use in large scale parameter scans. The minimization of the scalar…