Related papers: False vacuum decay: an introductory review
We find the novel effect on the decay of a false vacuum in view of quantum field theory, which is induced by a field coupling to the scalar field related to a first-order phase transition. This effect of the environment can never be…
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…
The decay rates of quasistable states in quantum field theories are usually calculated using instanton methods. Standard derivations of these methods rely in a crucial way upon deformations and analytic continuations of the physical…
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 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.…
We consider a model where a scalar field develops a metastable vacuum state and weakly interacts with another scalar field. In this situation we find the probability of decay of the false vacuum stimulated by the presence and collisions of…
Tunneling in quantum field theory is worth understanding properly, not least because it controls the long term fate of our universe. There are however, a number of features of tunneling rate calculations which lack a desirable transparency,…
We review the formalism by which the tunnelling probability of an unstable ground state can be computed in quantum field theory, with special reference to the Standard Model of electroweak interactions. We describe in some detail the…
Motivated by cosmological examples we study quantum field theoretical tunnelling from an initial state where the "classical field", i.e. the vacuum expectation value of the field operator is spatially homogeneous but performing a…
This paper is devoted to the study of quantum dissipation in cluster decay phenomena in the frame of the Lindblad approach to quantum open systems. The tunneling of a metastable state across a piecewise quadratic potential is envisaged for…
We consider the decay of "false kinks," that is, kinks formed in a scalar field theory with a pair of degenerate symmetry-breaking false vacua in 1+1 dimensions. The true vacuum is symmetric. A second scalar field and a peculiar potential…
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.
We study the decay of general initial states out of a metastable potential well in quantum mechanics. We provide a closed-form expression for the probability current that tunnels through the barrier in terms of the resonant states into…
In quantum field theory, the decay of an extended metastable state into the real ground state is known as ``false vacuum decay'' and it takes place via the nucleation of spatially localized bubbles. Despite the large theoretical effort to…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in…
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…
Tunneling is a fascinating aspect of quantum mechanics that renders the local minima of a potential meta-stable, with important consequences for particle physics, for the early hot stage of the universe, and more speculatively, for the…
We suggest a technique that explicitly accounts for the structure of an initial state of quantum field in the semiclassical calculations of path integral in curved space-time, and consider decay of metastable state (conformal vacuum of…
Recently, the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable vacua, has been reformulated as an elementary variational problem in field space. This paper extends this formalism to…