Related papers: False vacuum decay rates, more precisely
With the Higgs mass now measured at the sub-percent level, the potential metastability of the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model (SM) motivates renewed study of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this note, we describe an…
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…
The one-loop effective action for non-minimal scalar modified gravity on de Sitter background with a constant scalar field is found. The corresponding induced cosmological constant is evaluated. It is shown that quantum effects in…
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 consider a model where a scalar field develops a metastable vacuum state and weakly interacts with another scalar field. In this situation we find the probability of decay of the false vacuum stimulated by the presence and collisions of…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
Semiclassical techniques have proven to be a very powerful method to extract physical effects from different quantum theories. Therefore, it is expected that in the near future they will play a very prominent role in the context of quantum…
We study quantum radiation generated by a uniformly accelerated motion of small spherical mirrors. To obtain Green's function for a scalar massless field we use Wick's rotation. In the Euclidean domain the problem is reduced to finding an…
The semiclassical Euclidean path integral method is applied to compute the low temperature quantum decay rate for a particle placed in the metastable minimum of a cubic potential in a {\it finite} time theory. The classical path, which…
Metastable states decay at zero temperature through quantum tunneling at an exponentially small rate, which depends on the Coleman-de Luccia instanton, also known as bounce. In some theories, the bounce may not exist or its on-shell action…
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 study a supersymmetric model in curved background spacetime. We calculate the effective action and the vacuum expectation value of the energy momentum tensor using a covariant regularization procedure. A soft supersymmetry breaking…
Computing functional determinants of differential operators is central to any field-theoretical calculation relying on a saddle-point expansion. A variety of approaches is available for the computation that avoid having to know the…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false-vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations…
We study the process of vacuum decay in quantum field theory focusing on the stochastic aspects of the interaction between long and short-wavelength modes. This interaction results in a diffusive behavior of the reduced Wigner function…
The fundamental vacuum state of quantum fields, related to Minkowski space, produces divergent fluctuations that must be suppressed in order to bring reality to the description of physical systems. As a consequence, negative vacuum…
Perfectly conducting boundaries, and their Dirichlet counterparts for quantum scalar fields, predict nonintegrable energy densities. A more realistic model with a finite ultraviolet cutoff yields two inconsistent values for the force on a…
Recently the partial wave cutoff method was developed as a new calculational scheme for a functional determinant of quantum field theory in radial backgrounds. For the contribution given by an infinite sum of large partial waves, we derive…
We consider the vacuum partition function of a 4d scalar QFT in a curved background as function of bare marginal and relevant couplings. A local UV cutoff $\Lambda(x)$ transforming under Weyl rescalings allows to construct Weyl invariant…