Related papers: Vacuum Decay Actions from Tunneling Potentials for…
We consider the vacuum decay of the flat Minkowski space to an anti-de Sitter space. We find a one-parameter family of potentials that allow exact, analytical instanton solutions describing tunneling without barriers in the presence of…
Quantum transitions among de Sitter and Minkowski spacetimes through bubble nucleation are revisited using the Hamiltonian formalism. We interpret tunnelling probabilities as relative probabilities: the ratio of the squared wave functionals…
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 false vacuum decay catalysed by black holes under the influence of the higher order Gauss-Bonnet term. We study both bubble nucleation and Hawking-Moss types of phase transition in arbitrary dimension. The equations of motion…
We study the decay of the false vacuum in the regime where the quantum field theory analysis is not valid, since gravitational effects become important. This happens when the height of the barrier separating the false and the true vacuum is…
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 consider the question of whether cosmic ray catalysed false vacuum decay can be phenomenologically more important than spontaneous decay via quantum tunnelling. We extend the zero bubble wall width Landau-WKB analysis of catalysed false…
We provide a method to calculate the rate of false vacuum decay induced by a black hole. The method uses complex tunneling solutions and consistently takes into account the structure of different quantum vacua in the black hole metric via…
We study a false vacuum decay in a two-dimensional black hole spacetime background. The decay rate in the case that nucleation site locates at a black hole center has been calculated in the literature. We develop a method for calculating…
We discuss new possible tunneling processes in the presence of gravity. We formulate quantum tunneling using the Wheeler-deWitt canonical quantization and the WKB approximation. The distinctive feature of our formulation is that it…
The Standard Model Higgs potential may become unbounded from below at large field values, with important cosmological implications. For a potential of this form, the commonly assumed scenario of a nucleated thin-wall bubble driving the…
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…
Some solutions describing vacuum decay exhibit a catastrophic instability. This, so-called negative mode problem in quantum tunneling with gravity, was discovered 34 years ago and in spite of the fact that in these years many different…
I describe a class of oscillating bounce solutions to the Euclidean field equations for gravity coupled to a scalar field theory with multiple vacua. I discuss their implications for vacuum tunneling transitions and for elucidating the…
The relative probability to decay towards different vacua during inflation is studied. The calculation is performed in single-field slow-roll potentials using the stochastic inflation formalism. Various situations are investigated,…
We present a calculation of thick-wall Coleman-de-Luccia (CdL) bounces in the Standard Model effective potential in a de Sitter background. The calculation is performed including the effect of the bounce back-reaction on the metric, which…
We study the effects of Goldstone modes on the stability of the vacuum in a $U(1)$ theory for a complex scalar field. The dynamics of the field resemble those of Keplerian motion in the presence of time-dependent friction, whose equations…
The probability of destruction of a metastable vacuum state by the field of a highly virtual particle with energy $E$ is calculated for a (3+1) dimensional theory in the leading WKB approximation in the thin-wall limit. It is found that the…
In the functional Schrodinger formalism, we obtain the wave function describing collapsing dust in an anti-de Sitter background, as seen by a co-moving observer, by mapping the resulting variable mass Schrodinger equation to that of the…
We study zero-temperature false vacuum decay in $D$ compact spatial dimensions and show that for volumes below a critical value a new bounce solution, different from Coleman's celebrated $O(D)$ bubble, mediates the decay process, and…