Related papers: False vacuum decay: an introductory review
We study the decay of a thermally excited metastable vacuum in classical field theory using real-time numerical simulations. We find a significantly lower decay rate than predicted by standard thermal theory at moderate temperatures,…
The standard bounce formalism for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum cannot be applied to theories in which the symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections, because in such theories the tree-level action has no bounce…
A semi-classical model based on quantum time concepts is presented for the evaluation of bremsstrahlung emission probabilities in alpha decay of nuclei. The contribution to the bremsstrahlung emission from the different regions in tunneling…
Background: Quantum tunneling in many-body systems is the subject of many experimental and theoretical studies in fields ranging from cold atoms to nuclear physics. However, theoretical description of quantum tunneling with strongly…
We study the process of thermal activation mediated by sphaleron transitions by analyzing the real-time dynamics of the decay out of equilibrium in a $1+1$ dimensional field theory with a metastable state. The situation considered is that…
A semiclassical theory is developed and compared to experiments on the tunneling resonance spectrum for a quantum well in magnetic field tilted with respect to the tunneling direction. As the tilt angle is increased from zero the classical…
We study false vacuum decays catalysed by magnetic monopoles which act as tunnelling sites with exponentially enhanced decay rates. The field profiles describing the decay do not have the typically assumed $O(3)/O(4)$ symmetry, thus…
Various aspects of time-dependent processes are studied within the large N approximation of O(N) vector models in three dimensions. These include the rolling of fields, the tunneling and decay of vacua. We present an exact solution for the…
Metastability is a quintessential feature of first order quantum phase transitions, which is lost either by dynamical instability or by nucleating bubbles of a true vacuum through quantum tunneling. By considering a drive across the first…
We study the influence of a tunnel barrier on the quantum transport through a circular cavity. Our analysis in terms of classical trajectories shows that the semiclassical approaches developed for ballistic transport can be adapted to deal…
The finite size theory of metastability in a quartic potential is developed by the semiclassical path integral method. In the quantum regime, the relation between temperature and classical particle energy is found in terms of the first…
An expanding closed universe filled with radiation can either recollapse or tunnel to the regime of unbounded expansion, if the cosmological constant is nonzero. We re-examine the question of particle creation during tunneling, with the…
Whether the Standard Model electroweak vacuum is stable, metastable or unstable depends crucially on the top mass (and, to a lesser extent, on other measurable quantities). These topics are reviewed and updated by taking into account the…
We perform a precise calculation of the decay rate of the electroweak vacuum in the standard model as well as in models beyond the standard model. We use a recently-developed technique to calculate the decay rate of a false vacuum, which…
The probabilities of tunnel ionization of particles confined by one-dimensional power-law and logarithmic potentials are calculated for constant and low-frequency electric fields.
We introduce a complex-extended continuum level density and apply it to one-dimensional scattering problems involving tunneling through finite-range potentials. We show that the real part of the density is proportional to a real "time…
We analyse the evolution of the entanglement of a non-trivial initial quantum field state (which, for simplicity, has been taken to be a bipartite state made out of vacuum and the first excited state) when it undergoes a gravitational…
Traditional simulated annealing utilizes thermal fluctuations for convergence in optimization problems. Quantum tunneling provides a different mechanism for moving between states, with the potential for reduced time scales. We compare…
There are several exotic tunneling processes that can be realized only by incorporating the effect of gravity. Here, we point out that we encounter difficulties in constructing the WKB wave function, once we try to describe quantum…
We present a formalism for semiclassical time evolution in quantum mechanics, building on a century of work. We identify complex saddle points in real time, real saddle points in complex time, and complex saddle points in complex time that…