Related papers: The Boring Monopole
The Euclidean bounce for vacuum decay enjoys an $O(4)$ symmetry that is lost in the presence of impurities than can catalyze the decay. We present a formulation for the calculation of the tunneling decay action, that is explicitly positive…
Quantum tunneling of vortices has been found to be an important novel phenomena for description of low temperature creep in high temperature superconductors (HTSCs). We speculate that quantum tunneling may be also exhibited in mesoscopic…
A cosmology with a dynamical Planck mass $m_{pl}$ is shown to solve the horizon and monopole problems (and possibly flatness) if there is an early MAD (modified aging) era where the universe becomes older than in the standard model as a…
We examine the issue of monopole annihilation at the electroweak scale induced by flux tube confinement, concentrating first on the simplest possibility---one which requires no new physics beyond the standard model. Monopoles existing at…
A global monopole (or other topological defect) formed during a recent phase transition with core size comparable to the present Hubble scale, could induce the observed accelerating expansion of the universe. In such a model, topological…
We re-examine the problem of vacuum decay in the presence of spherically symmetric black holes. Within the semiclassical approximation, we study configurations describing a bubble of true vacuum propagating outside a black hole formed from…
Degeneracy is a method to accommodate exact, low energy vacuum states in scalar-tensor gravitational models despite the presence of an arbitrarily large vacuum energy. However, this approach requires very particular combinations of scalar…
We revisit the formalism for tunneling in quantum field theory developed by Coleman and collaborators. In particular using the generalization of WKB methods for tunneling in quantum mechanics we avoid the problems with negative eigenvalues…
The Coleman formula for vacuum decay and bubble nucleation has been used to estimate the tunneling rate in models of axion monodromy in recent literature. However, several of Coleman's original assumptions do not hold for such models. Here…
Experimentally observed magnetic fields with nanoscale variations are theoretically modeled by a piece-wise constant function with jump discontinuity along a smooth curve, the magnetic edge. Assuming the edge is a closed curve with an axis…
We extend the study of the effect of static primordial black holes on vacuum decay. In particular, we compare the tunneling rates between vacua of different values of the cosmological constant and black hole mass by pointing out the…
Decaying vacuum models are a class of models that incorporate the vacuum energy density as a time-evolving entity that has the potential to explain the entire evolutionary history of the universe in a single framework. A general solution to…
Certain frustrated systems, including spin ice and dimer models, exhibit a Coulomb phase at low temperatures, with power-law correlations and fractionalized monopole excitations. Transitions out of this phase, at which the effective gauge…
With the standard system for an SU(2) Higgs field in M_4 X S_1, the top and bottom component of the Higgs spinor have exactly the same coeficients for the quadratic and quadric terms. This makes the vacuum degenerate and thus there are no…
We present an effective action approach for the problem of Coulomb blocking of tunneling. The method is applied to the ``strong coupling'' problem arising near zero bias, where perturbation theory diverges. By a semiclassical argument, we…
The magnetic charges of monopoles arising in ultraviolet completions of the Standard Model are constrained by the global structure of the gauge group. After electroweak symmetry breaking, a subset of the ultraviolet monopoles carrying…
A procedure is reported for numerical analysis of false vacuum transition in a model with multiple scalar fields. It is a refined version of the approach by Konstandin and Huber. The alteration makes it possible to tackle a class of…
One of the remarkable features of black holes is that they possess a thermodynamic description, even though they do not appear to be statistical systems. We use self-gravitating magnetic monopole solutions as tools for understanding the…
Recently we proposed a mechanism for sequestering the Standard Model vacuum energy that predicts that the universe will collapse. Here we present a simple mechanism for bringing about this collapse, employing a scalar field whose potential…
In the thin-wall approximation, the decay of a gravitating false vacuum to a lower-energy state is affected by the cosmological horizon structure in both spaces. The nucleation radius of a bubble of true vacuum depends on the surface…