Related papers: Vacuum Decay in Time-Dependent Backgrounds
We consider vacuum tunneling of a new kind where the false vacua are not translationally invariant, but have topological defects that break some of their translational symmetries. In the particular case where the topological defects are…
We discuss models in which vacua other than our own can be directly observed in the present universe. Models with density-dependent vacuum structure can give rise to `non-lethal'-vacua: vacua with lower energy-density than our vacuum, but…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
The phenomenon of quantum tunneling is reviewed and an overview of applying approximate methods for studying this effect is given. An approach to a time-dependent formalism is proposed in one dimension and generalized to higher dimensions.…
We consider a minisuperspace model for a closed universe with small and positive cosmological constant, filled with a massive scalar field conformally coupled to gravity. In the quantum version of this model, the universe may undergo a…
We develop a hybrid semiclassical method to study the time evolution of one dimensional quantum systems in and out of equilibrium. Our method handles internal degrees of freedom completely quantum mechanically by a modified time evolving…
We study domain-walls and bubble nucleation in a non-relativistic vector field theory with different longitudinal and transverse speeds of sound. We describe analytical and numerical methods to calculate the orientation dependent…
The Euclidean action is calculated in the thin-wall approximation for a first-order vacuum phase transition in which the bubble appears symmetrically around either a global monopole or a gauge cosmic string. The bubble is assumed to be much…
Time evolution of tunneling phenomena in medium is studied using a standard model of environment interaction. A semiclassical formula valid at low, but finite temperatures is derived in the form of integral transform for the reduced Wigner…
The false vacua of some potentials do not decay via Euclidean bounces. This typically happens for tunneling actions with a flat direction (in field configuration space) that is lifted by a perturbation into a sloping valley, pushing the…
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 computational investigation of tunneling at finite energy in a weakly coupled quantum mechanical system with two degrees of freedom. We compare a full quantum mechanical analysis to the results obtained by making use of a…
Tunneling of a quasibound state is a non-smooth process in the entangled many-body case. Using time-evolving block decimation, we show that repulsive (attractive) interactions speed up (slow down) tunneling, which occurs in bursts. While…
We study the effects of a fixed de Sitter geometry background in scenarios of false vacuum decay. It is currently understood that bubble nucleation processes associated with first order phase transitions are particularly important in…
The dynamics of the true-vacuum bubbles nucleated during a first-order phase transition is affected by the distribution functions of the particle species in the plasma, driven out-of-equilibrium by the travelling domain wall. An accurate…
Quasiclassical methods for non-adiabatic quantum dynamics can reveal new features of quantum effects, such as tunneling evolution, that are harder to reveal in standard treatments based on wave functions of stationary states. Here, these…
We investigate vacuum decays in the early Universe in the presence of curvature perturbations. For sufficiently large perturbations associated with over-densities, we find that the bounce solution develops an oscillating middle stage near…
We derive the fully time-dependent solution to a run-and-tumble model for a particle which has tumbling restricted to the boundaries of a one-dimensional interval. This is achieved through a field-theoretic perturbative framework by…
In the tight binding model with multiple degenerate vacua we might treat wave function overlaps as instanton tunnelings between different wells (vacua). An amplitude for such a tunneling process might be constructed as $\mathsf{T}_{i\to…
We consider a wave-function approach to the false vacuum decay with gravity and present a new method to calculate the tunneling amplitude under the WKB approximation. The result agrees with the one obtained by the Euclidean path-integral…