Related papers: Vacuum Decay Actions from Tunneling Potentials for…
Using the concept of real tunneling configurations (classical signature change) and nucleation energy, we explore the consequences of an alternative minimization procedure for the Euclidean action in multiple-dimensional quantum cosmology.…
The ground state of Bose-Einstein condensates with attractive particle interaction is metastable. One of the decay mechanisms of the condensate is a collapse by macroscopic quantum tunneling, which can be described by the bounce trajectory…
We examine the effect of large extra dimensions on vacuum decay in the Randall-Sundrum (RS) braneworld paradigm. We assume the scalar field is confined to the brane, and compute the probability for forming an "anti de Sitter" (AdS) bubble…
We study the dynamics of a spherically symmetric false vacuum bubble embedded in a true vacuum region separated by a "thick wall", which is generated by a scalar field in a quartic potential. We study the "Farhi-Guth-Guven" (FGG) quantum…
Motivated by our earlier argument that the apparent large cosmological constant from quantum fluctuations is actually an artifact of not using a full quantum mechanical superposition to determine the ground state in which the universe lives…
We discuss an exact false vacuum decay rate at one loop for a real and complex scalar field in a quartic-quartic potential with two tree-level minima. The bounce solution is used to compute the functional determinant from both fluctuations.…
Coleman-de Luccia processes for AdS to AdS decays in Einstein-scalar theories are studied. Such tunnelling processes are interpreted as vev-driven holographic RG flows of a quantum field theory on de Sitter space-time. These flows do not…
We study the contribution to the decay of de Sitter vacua from bounces with O(3) x O(2) symmetry. These correspond to the thermal production of a vacuum bubble at the center of a horizon volume with radius r_H and a temperature defined by…
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,…
We describe a new family of thin-wall instantons, with negative tension bubble walls, that mediate tunneling between Minkowski or de Sitter vacua. Some of these instantons can have exponentially enhanced tunneling rates, and would dominate…
Motivated by cosmological examples we study quantum field theoretical tunnelling from an initial state where the "classical field", i.e. the vacuum expectation value of the field operator is spatially homogeneous but performing a…
We explore a toy model mechanism of geometric cancellation, alleviating the (classical) cosmological constant problem. To do so, we assume at primordial times that vacuum energy fuels an inflationary quadratic hilltop potential nonminimally…
We study compactification of extra dimensions in a theory of Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) type gravity. We investigate the solution for Minkowski spacetime with an $S^2$ extra space as well as that for de Sitter spacetime ($S^4$) with an $S^2$…
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…
We derive the rate for transitions between de Sitter vacua by treating the field theory on the static patch as a thermal system. This reproduces the Coleman-De Luccia formalism for calculating the rate, but leads to a modified…
A detailed comparison of the expressions for the decay widths obtained within the semiclassical WKB approximation using different approaches to the tunneling problem is performed. The differences between the available improved formulae for…
The tunneling probability for a system modelling macroscopic quantum tunneling is computed. We consider an open quantum system with one degree of freedom consisting of a particle trapped in a cubic potential interacting with an environment…
Process of dynamical tunneling in two-dimensional coupled potentials is considered within Bohmian approach to quantum mechanics. Quantum trajectories tend to go along the paths where potential energy increases and then decreases. It leads…
Nothing---the absence of spacetime---can be either an endpoint of tunneling, as in the bubble of nothing, or a starting point for tunneling, as in the quantum creation of a universe. We argue that these two tunnelings can be treated within…
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…