Related papers: Revisiting Vacuum decay in Field Theory
We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…
We revisit the famous Coleman-de Luccia formalism for decay of false vacuum in gravitational theory. Since the corresponding wave function is time-independent we argue that its instanton's interpretation as the decay rate probability is…
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…
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…
The tunneling potential formalism, an alternative to the standard Coleman Euclidean approach, offers in a natural way a unified view of vacuum decays. In particular, I show in this talk how Coleman's bounce is just a member of a continuous…
We reformulate quantum tunneling in a multi-dimensional system where the tunneling sector is non-linearly coupled to oscillators. The WKB wave function is explicitly constructed under the assumption that the system was in the ground state…
We provide a semiclassical theory of tunneling decay in a magnetic field and a three-dimensional potential of a general form. Because of broken time-reversal symmetry, the standard WKB technique has to be modified. The decay rate is found…
Tunneling is a fascinating aspect of quantum mechanics that renders the local minima of a potential meta-stable, with important consequences for particle physics, for the early hot stage of the universe, and more speculatively, for the…
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…
Tunneling in quantum field theory is worth understanding properly, not least because it controls the long term fate of our universe. There are however, a number of features of tunneling rate calculations which lack a desirable transparency,…
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…
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…
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 new method which allows one to evaluate the false vacuum decay rate for a general potential which may depend on an arbitrary number of scalar fields.
Quantum tunneling introduces a fundamental difference between classical and quantum mechanics. Whenever the classical ground state is non-unique (degenerate), quantum mechanics restore uniqueness thanks to tunneling. A condensate in a…
We consider the decay of "false kinks," that is, kinks formed in a scalar field theory with a pair of degenerate symmetry-breaking false vacua in 1+1 dimensions. The true vacuum is symmetric. A second scalar field and a peculiar potential…
The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is investigated and used to examine a state after a quantum tunneling with gravity. To make arguments definite we treat a discretized version of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and adopt the WKB method. We expand an…
We study quantum mechanical tunneling using complex solutions of the classical field equations. Simple visualization techniques allow us to unify and generalize previous treatments, and straightforwardly show the connection to the standard…
We consider the generalisation of quantum tunneling transitions in the WKB approximation to the time-independent functional Schr\"odinger and Wheeler-DeWitt equations. Following a Lorentzian approach, we compute the transition rates among…
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…