Related papers: Vacuum Decay in Time-Dependent Backgrounds
The Coleman formula for vacuum decay and bubble nucleation has been used to estimate the tunneling rate in models of axion monodromy in recent literature. However, several of Coleman's original assumptions do not hold for such models. Here…
We present a formalism for semiclassical time evolution in quantum mechanics, building on a century of work. We identify complex saddle points in real time, real saddle points in complex time, and complex saddle points in complex time that…
We present here a set of lecture notes on quantum systems with time-dependent boundaries. In particular, we analyze the dynamics of a non-relativistic particle in a bounded domain of physical space, when the boundaries are moving or…
We analyze the problem of one dimensional quantum particle falling in a constant gravitational field, also known as the {\it bouncing ball}, employing a semiclassical approach known as momentous effective quantum mechanics. In this…
Quantum particles interacting with potential barriers are ubiquitous in physics, and the question of how much time they spend inside classically forbidden regions has attracted interest for many decades. Recent developments of new…
Numerical methods for the simulation of cavitation processes have been developed for more than 50 years. The rich variety of physical phenomena triggered by the collapse of a bubble has several applications in medicine and environmental…
This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We introduce a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum…
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…
Strongly first-order phase transitions, i.e., those with a large order parameter, are characterized by a considerable supercooling and high velocities of phase transition fronts. A very strong phase transition may have important…
In this paper, we numerically study the impact heavy field degrees of freedom have on vacuum metastability in a toy model, with the aim of better understanding how the decoupling theorem extends to semiclassical processes. We observe that…
Decaying turbulence is studied numerically using as initial condition a random flow whose shell-integrated energy spectrum increases with wavenumber k like k^q. Alternatively, initial conditions are generated from a driven turbulence…
Metastability is a quintessential feature of first order quantum phase transitions, which is lost either by dynamical instability or by nucleating bubbles of a true vacuum through quantum tunneling. By considering a drive across the first…
The rate and manner of vacuum decay are calculated in an explicit flux compactification, including all thick-wall and gravitational effects. For landscapes built of many units of a single flux, the fastest decay is usually to discharge just…
We identify instantons representing vacuum decay in a 6-dimensional toy model for string theory flux compactifications, with the two extra dimensions compactified on a sphere. We evaluate the instanton action for tunneling between different…
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…
We investigate and classify the possible types of false vacuum bubbles in Einstein gravity. The false vacuum bubbles can occur only if gravity is taken into account. We show that there exist solutions only with compact geometries. The…
We study the time evolution of a single spin coupled inhomogeneously to a spin environment. Such a system is realized by a single electron spin bound in a semiconductor nanostructure and interacting with surrounding nuclear spins. We find…
A practical way to deal with the problem of time in quantum cosmology and quantum gravity is proposed. The main tool is effective equations, which mainly restrict explicit considerations to semiclassical regimes but have the crucial…
I present a numerical package (CosmoTransitions) for analyzing finite-temperature cosmological phase transitions driven by single or multiple scalar fields. The package analyzes the different vacua of a theory to determine their critical…
A semi-classical model based on quantum time concepts is presented for the evaluation of bremsstrahlung emission probabilities in alpha decay of nuclei. The contribution to the bremsstrahlung emission from the different regions in tunneling…