Related papers: Instantons: thick-wall approximation
The role of instantons is investigated in the Lagrangian model for the velocity gradient evolution known as the Recent Fluid Deformation approximation. After recasting the model into the path-integral formalism, the probability distribution…
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 study the quantum-mechanical tunneling phenomenon in models which include the existence of non-equivalent vacua. For such a purpose we evaluate the euclidean propagator between two minima of the potential at issue in terms of the…
The vacuum decay in a de Sitter universe is studied within semiclassical approximation for the class of effective inflaton potentials whose curvature at the top is close to a critical value. By comparing the actions of the Hawking - Moss…
We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub…
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…
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…
The axion Weak Gravity Conjecture implies that when parametrically increasing the axion decay constants, instanton corrections become increasingly important. We provide strong evidence for the validity of this conjecture by studying the…
We study the fate of a false vacuum in the case of a potential that contains a portion which is quartic and unbounded. We first prove that an $O(4)$ invariant instanton with the Coleman boundary conditions does not exist in this case. This,…
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…
A procedure is reported for numerical analysis of false vacuum transition in a model with multiple scalar fields. It is a refined version of the approach by Konstandin and Huber. The alteration makes it possible to tackle a class of…
I point out that the usual Coleman-de Luccia analysis of tunnelling via instantons between perturbatively stable minima using the thin-wall approximation misses one of the effects of gravitational backreaction on the on-shell action and…
We identify an infinite class of unbounded potentials for which the Coleman instantons do not exist in D-dimensional spacetime. For such potentials, the decay of a false vacuum is described by the new instantons introduced in [5,6,4]. For…
We identify infinite classes of potentials for which the Coleman instantons do not exist. For these potentials, the decay of a false vacuum must be described by the new instantons introduced in [7,8].
We investigate the bounce solutions in vacuum decay problems. We show that it is possible to have a stable false vacuum in a potential that is unbounded from below.
Extreme events play a crucial role in fluid turbulence. Inspired by methods from field theory, these extreme events, their evolution and probability can be computed with help of the instanton formalism as minimizers of a suitable action…
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…
We extend the use of Configurational Information Measures (CIMSs) to instantons and vacuum decay in arbitrary spatial dimensions. We find that both the complexity and the information content in the shape of instanton solutions have distinct…
The rate and manner of vacuum decay are calculated in an explicit flux compactification, including all thick-wall and gravitational effects. For landscapes built of many units of a single flux, the fastest decay is usually to discharge just…
We develop a new real-time approach to vacuum decay based on a reduction to a finite number of degrees of freedom. The dynamics is followed by solving a generalized Schr\"odinger equation. We first apply this method to a real scalar field…