Related papers: Instantons: thick-wall approximation
We investigate the decay rate of a false vacuum state in de Sitter space at high Hubble rates, using two methods: the Hawking-Moss instanton method which is fully quantum mechanical but relies on the saddle-point approximation, and the…
The emptiness formation problem is addressed for a one-dimensional quantum polytropic gas characterized by an arbitrary polytropic index $\gamma$, which defines the equation of state $P \sim \rho^\gamma$, where $P$ is the pressure and…
The tunneling potential formalism makes it easy to construct exact solutions to the vacuum decay problem in potentials with multiple fields. While some exact solutions for single-field decays were known, we present the first nontrivial…
Terminal velocity reached by bubble walls in first order phase transitions is an important parameter determining both primordial gravitational-wave spectrum and production of baryon asymmetry in models of electroweak baryogenesis. We…
Supercritical string theories in D>10 dimensions with no moduli are described, generalizing the asymmetric orientifold construction of one of the authors. By taking the number of dimensions to be large and turning on fluxes, dilaton…
This paper presents a simple framework that organizes thin-wall Coleman-De Luccia instantons based on the Euclidean geometries of their original and tunneled vacuum patches. We consider all a priori allowed vacuum pairs (de Sitter or…
We investigate the instanton solution between the degenerate vacua in curved space. We show that there exist $O(4)$-symmetric solutions not only in de Sitter but also in both flat and anti-de Sitter space. The geometry of the new type of…
An alternative approach to the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable phases, is presented. The new method circumvents the use of bounces in Euclidean space by introducing an…
Ultracold atomic gases can undergo phase transitions that mimic relativistic vacuum decay, allowing us to empirically test early-Universe physics in tabletop experiments. We investigate the physics of these analog systems, going beyond…
Uniform continuity bounds on entropies are generally expressed in terms of a single distance measure between a pair of probability distributions or quantum states, typically, the total variation distance or trace distance. However, if an…
In this second part of the treatment of instantons in quantum mechanics, the focus is on specific calculations related to a number of quantum mechanical potentials with degenerate minima. We calculate the leading multi-instanton…
Based on the study of the simple Abelian Higgs model in $1+1$ dimensions we will present a new method to identify and localize extended instantons. The idea is to measure the topological charge on regions somewhat larger than the extended…
Bubbles of nothing are a class of vacuum decay processes present in some theories with compactified extra dimensions. We investigate the existence and properties of bubbles of nothing in models where the scalar pseudomoduli controlling the…
Recently, questions have been raised about the role of Lorentz invariance in false vacuum decay. It has been argued that infinities may arise in an integration over Lorentz-boosted final states. This suggestion motivates a Minkowski-space…
We investigate the hydrodynamic solutions for expanding bubbles in cosmological first-order phase transitions going beyond local thermal equilibrium approximation. Under the assumption of a tangenosidal field profile, we supplement the…
The proximal alternating linearized minimization method (PALM) suits well for solving block-structured optimization problems, which are ubiquitous in real applications. In the cases where subproblems do not have closed-form solutions, e.g.,…
The detailed analysis of nonperturbative contributions to the electromagnetic quark form factor is performed within the framework of the instanton liquid model (ILM) of the QCD vacuum. The method of the path-ordered Wilson exponentials is…
We look for instanton solutions in a class of two scalar field gravity models, which includes the low energy string action in four dimensions. In models where the matter field has a potential with a false vacuum, we find that non-singular…
The known calculations of the fermion condensate $<\bar{\psi}\psi>$ and the correlator $<\bar{\psi}\psi(x) ~\bar{\psi}\psi(0)>$ have been interpreted in terms of {\em localized} instanton solutions minimizing the {\em effective} action.…
We consider the possibility that tunneling in a degenerate double-well potential in de Sitter spacetime leads to coherent oscillations of quantum probability to find the system in a given well. We concentrate on the case when the mass scale…