Related papers: Vacuum Decay in Time-Dependent Backgrounds
We study the effects of internal symmetries on the decay by bubble nucleation of a metastable false vacuum. The zero modes about the bounce solution that are associated with the breaking of continuous internal symmetries result in an…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
The liquid-vapor transition is a classic example of a discontinuous (first-order) phase transition. Such transitions underlie many phenomena in cosmology, nuclear and particle physics, and condensed-matter physics. They give rise to…
Process of quantum tunneling of particles in various physical systems can be effectively controlled even by a weak and slow varying in time electromagnetic signal if to adapt specially its shape to a particular system. During an…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
We study the possibility of forming the false vacuum bubble nucleated within the true vacuum background via the true-to-false vacuum phase transition in curved spacetime. We consider a semiclassical Euclidean bubble in the Einstein theory…
We numerically investigate nucleation processes in the transient dynamics of the two-dimensional complex Ginzburg-Landau equation towards its "frozen" state with quasi-stationary spiral structures. We study the transition kinetics from…
We revisit quantum false vacuum decay for the one-dimensional Ising model, focusing on the real-time nucleation and growth of true vacuum bubbles. Via matrix product state simulations, we demonstrate that for a wide range of parameters, the…
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 revisit the path integral description of quantum tunneling and lay the groundwork for its generalization to excites states through real-time path integral techniques. For clarity, we focus on the simple toy model of a point particle in a…
The periodic bounce configurations responsible for quantum tunneling are obtained explicitly and are extended to the finite energy case for minisuperspace models of the Universe. As a common feature of the tunneling models at finite energy…
We revisit the formalism for tunneling in quantum field theory developed by Coleman and collaborators. In particular using the generalization of WKB methods for tunneling in quantum mechanics we avoid the problems with negative eigenvalues…
In canonical quantum cosmology, the wave function of the universe lacks explicit time dependence. However, time evolution may be present implicitly through the semiclassical superspace variables, which themselves depend on time in classical…
In quantum field theory (QFT), the "vacuum" is not just empty space but the lowest-energy state of a quantum field. If the energy landscape has multiple local minima, the local ground states are the false vacuum (FV) which can tunnel…
False vacuum decay in quantum mechanical first order phase transitions is a phenomenon with wide implications in cosmology, and presents interesting theoretical challenges. In the standard approach, it is assumed that false vacuum decay…
This article is dedicated to cosmologies with variable speed of light (VSL) - models, which one can consider as a particular case of models of a modified gravitation. In quantum cosmology the closed universe can spontaneously nucleate out…
In the thin-wall approximation, the decay of a gravitating false vacuum to a lower-energy state is affected by the cosmological horizon structure in both spaces. The nucleation radius of a bubble of true vacuum depends on the surface…
Motivated by recent time domain experiments on ultrafast atom ionization, we analyze the transients and timescales that characterize, besides the relatively long lifetime, the decay by tunneling of a localized state. While the tunneling…
In quantum field theory, the decay of an extended metastable state into the real ground state is known as ``false vacuum decay'' and it takes place via the nucleation of spatially localized bubbles. Despite the large theoretical effort to…
We study the steady state motion of bubble walls in cosmological phase transitions. Taking into account the boundary and continuity conditions for the fluid variables, we calculate numerically the wall velocity as a function of the…