Related papers: False vacuum decay: an introductory review
As originally described by Rubakov, particles are produced during the tunneling of a metastable quantum field. We propose to extend his formalism to compute the backreaction of these particles on the semiclassical decay probability of the…
We investigate false vacuum decay of a relativistic scalar field initialized in the metastable minimum of an asymmetric double-well potential. The transition to the true ground state is a well-defined initial-value problem in real time,…
The tunneling decay rate per unit volume in Quantum Field Theory (QFT), at order $\hbar$, is given by $\Gamma/V = Ae^{-B}$, where $B$ is the Euclidean action evaluated at the so-called bounce, and $A$ is proportional to the determinant of a…
When tunneling occurs out of generic initial states, a significant fraction of probability is lost at early times during which the dynamics is governed by excited resonance states. However, first-principles analyses based on path integrals…
False vacuum decay, a quantum mechanical first-order phase transition in scalar field theories, is an important phenomenon in early universe cosmology. Recently, real-time semi-classical techniques based on ensembles of lattice simulations…
We study the quantum tunnel effect through a potential barrier employing a semiclassical formulation of quantum mechanics based on expectation values of configuration variables and quantum dispersions as dynamical variables. The evolution…
We propose a similarity between the scenario of fate of false vacuum in cosmology at early universe and the situation in where the quantum state decays in superconducting Flux qubit. This is due to the fact that both cases have two…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
We study the temporal aspects of quantum tunneling as manifested in time-of-arrival experiments in which the detected particle tunnels through a potential barrier. In particular, we present a general method for constructing temporal…
We describe a computational investigation of tunneling at finite energy in a weakly coupled quantum mechanical system with two degrees of freedom. We compare a full quantum mechanical analysis to the results obtained by making use of a…
The false vacuum is a metastable state that can occur in quantum field theory, and its decay was first studied semi-classically by Coleman. In this work we consider the 1+1 dimensional $\varphi^4$ theory, which is the simplest model that…
We present a new method for calculating quantum tunneling rates using lattice Monte Carlo simulations in imaginary time. This method is designed with the goal of studying false vacuum decay non-perturbatively on the lattice. We derive a new…
We analyze vacuum tunneling in quantum field theory in a general formalism by using the Wigner representation. In the standard instanton formalism, one usually approximates the initial false vacuum state by an eigenstate of the field…
Several relevant aspects of quantum-field processes can be well described by semiclassical methods. In particular, the knowledge of non-trivial classical solutions of the field equations, and the thermal and quantum fluctuations around…
With the Higgs mass now measured at the sub-percent level, the potential metastability of the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model (SM) motivates renewed study of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this note, we describe an…
We consider tunneling processes in QFT induced by collisions of elementary particles. We propose a semiclassical method for estimating the probability of these processes in the limit of very high collision energy. As an illustration, we…
The semiclassical formalism for numerical calculation of the rate of tunneling transitions induced by N particles with total energy E of order or higher than the height of the barrier is developed. The formalism is applied to the induced…
The false vacuum decay has been a central theme in physics for half a century with applications to cosmology and to the theory of fundamental interactions. This fascinating phenomenon is even more intriguing when combined with the…
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 evolution of the quantum wave packet describing an atom trapped in the surface-tip junction of the scanning tunneling microscope is investigated by using the time-dependent Schroedinger equation, and by a quasi-classical Hamiltonian…