Related papers: Tunneling Potentials to Nothing
We investigate the non-perturbative stability of supersymmetric compactifications with respect to decay via a bubble of nothing. We show examples where this kind of instability is not prohibited by the spin structure, i.e., periodicity of…
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 Tunneling Potential Formalism was introduced to calculate the tunneling actions that control vacuum decay as an alternative to the standard Euclidean Formalism. The new approach sets the problem as a simple variational problem in field…
We study the effect of vortices on the tunneling decay of a symmetry-breaking false vacuum in three spacetime dimensions with gravity. The scenario considered is one in which the initial state, rather than being the homogeneous false…
We investigate false vacuum decay catalysed by black holes under the influence of the higher order Gauss-Bonnet term. We study both bubble nucleation and Hawking-Moss types of phase transition in arbitrary dimension. The equations of motion…
In the decay process of metastable vacua in quantum field theories, the bounce solution, a classical solution in Euclideanized theories, is helpful in calculating the decay rate. Recently, the bounce solution with a conical singularity has…
We identify an infinite class of unbounded potentials for which the Coleman instantons do not exist in D-dimensional spacetime. For such potentials, the decay of a false vacuum is described by the new instantons introduced in [5,6,4]. For…
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…
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…
We investigate the formation via tunneling of inflating (false-vacuum) bubbles in a true-vacuum background, and the reverse process. Using effective potentials from the junction condition formalism, all true- and false-vacuum bubble…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
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…
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 study the problem of false vacuum decay in arbitrary dimensions, in the presence of gravity, and compute the transition probability within the thin-wall approximation, generalising the results of Coleman and de Luccia. In the particular…
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…
Coleman-de Luccia transitions are spontaneous processes of nucleation of bubbles within metastable gravitational vacua including in their interior a true stable vacuum. From the perspective of lower-dimensional gauged supergravities…
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…
We investigate the negative modes about Coleman-De Luccia bounces governing vacuum transitions in de Sitter space, with the goal of gaining physical insight into the various anomalous results associated with these that have been reported in…
The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting…
The Euclidean bounce for vacuum decay enjoys an $O(4)$ symmetry that is lost in the presence of impurities than can catalyze the decay. We present a formulation for the calculation of the tunneling decay action, that is explicitly positive…