Related papers: The Boring Monopole
We study the phase diagram of a confining three-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric $\text{U}(N)\times\text{U}(N+M)$ theory with holographic dual corresponding to a known string theory solution. The theory possesses a global…
The tunneling Hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wave functions. Here we present a generalization of the tunneling Hamiltonian to quantum…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
We determine the detailed thermodynamic behavior of vortices in the O(2) scalar model in 2D and of global monopoles in the O(3) model in 3D. We construct new numerical techniques, based on cluster decomposition algorithms, to analyze the…
The Mott transition is observed experimentally in materials that are magnetically frustrated so that long-range order does not hide the Mott transition at finite temperature. The Hubbard model on the triangular lattice at half-filling is a…
We present an explicit example of a gauge symmetry breaking phase transition in heterotic models, the dynamics of which are not thermal and can be described in a well controlled manner throughout. The phase transition is driven by the…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles that may exist as quantized sources and sinks of the magnetic field. In materials, they may appear in an emergent quantum electrodynamics described by a U(1) lattice gauge theory. Particularly,…
We study false vacuum decay catalyzed by black holes. We consider a toy two-dimensional model of a scalar field with an unstable potential in the background of a dilaton black hole. A realistic black hole in four dimensions possesses the…
The electromagnetic decay and final annihilation of magnetic monopole-antimonopole pairs formed in the early universe has been proposed as a possible mechanism to produce the highest energy cosmic rays. We show that for a monopole abundance…
We consider a formalism to describe the false-vacuum decay of a scalar field in gauge theories in non-perturbative regimes. We find that the larger the gauge coupling with respect to the self-coupling of the scalar, the shallower the local…
The assisted tunneling of a metastable state between barriers is investigated analytically by means of a simplified one dimensional model. A time dependent perturbation changes the pole spectrum of the wave function introducing a larger…
Different dynamical symmetry breaking patterns are explored for the two dimensional phi4 model with higher order derivative terms. The one-loop saddle point expansion predicts a rather involved phase structure and a new Gaussian critical…
A method to determine the quantum state of a scalar field after $O(4)$-symmetric bubble nucleation has been developed recently. The method has an advantage that it concisely gives us a clear picture of the resultant quantum state. In…
The tunneling hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wavefunctions. Our problem is here applying what we did in the first paper to a driven…
The transition from a false vacuum to the true vacuum is a real-time phenomenon of interest in many contexts. It represents a special challenge for strongly interacting non-Abelian gauge theories because standard spacetime lattices…
The Euclidean action is calculated in the thin-wall approximation for a first-order vacuum phase transition in which the bubble appears symmetrically around either a global monopole or a gauge cosmic string. The bubble is assumed to be much…
It is shown that, in the theory of interacting Yang -Mills fields and a Higgs field, there is a topological degeneracy of Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) monopoles and that there arises, in this case, a chromoelectric monopole…
We discuss the possible influence of a cosmic magnetic field on the macroscopic quantum tunneling process associated, in a cosmological context, to the decay of the "false vacuum." We find a close analogy with the effects of an external…
The vortex picture of confinement is studied. The deconfinement phase transition is explained as a transition from a phase in which vortices percolate to a phase of small vortices. Lattice results are presented in support of this scenario.…