Related papers: Thermal False Vacuum Decay Is More Than It Seems
The electron vacuum fluctuations measured by $\cond$ do not vanish in an externally applied electric field $\calE$. For an exactly constant field, that is for vacuum fluctuations in presence of a constant accelerating force, we show that…
The decay rate of metastable states is determined at high temperatures by thermal activation, whereas at temperatures close to zero quantum tunneling is relevant. At some temperature $T_{c}$ the transition from classical to…
The Krylov-Fock expression of non-decay (or survival) probability, which allows to evaluate the deviations from the exponential decay law (nowadays well established experimentally), is more informative as it readily provides the…
Decay of a de Sitter vacuum may proceed through a "static" instanton, representing pair creation of critical bubbles separated by a distance comparable to the Hubble radius -- a process somewhat analogous to thermal activation in flat…
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…
Distinguishing whether a system supports alternate low-energy (locally stable) states -- stable (true vacuum) versus metastable (false vacuum) -- by direct observation can be difficult when the lifetime of the state is very long but…
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…
An intriguing phenomenon in non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics is the asymmetry of thermal processes. Relaxation to thermal equilibrium is the most important dissipative process, being a key concept for the design of heat engines and…
We investigate rarely explored details of supercooled cosmological first-order phase transitions at the electroweak scale, which may lead to strong gravitational wave signals or explain the cosmic baryon asymmetry. The nucleation…
The 'thin-wall approximation' gives a simple estimate of the decay rate of an unstable quantum field. Unfortunately, the approximation is uncontrolled. In this paper I show that there are actually two different thin-wall approximations and…
We quantize subcritical bubbles which are formed in the weakly first order phase transition. We find that the typical size of the thermal fluctuation reduces in the quantum-statistical physics. We estimate the typical size and the amplitude…
Many compactifications of higher-dimensional supersymmetric theories have approximate vacuum degeneracy. The associated moduli fields are stabilized by non-perturbative effects which break supersymmetry. We show that at finite temperature…
Thermal escape out of a metastable well is considered in the weak friction regime, where the bottleneck for decay is energy diffusion, and at lower temperatures, where quantum tunneling becomes relevant. Within a systematic semiclassical…
We investigate the dissipative dynamics of a quantum critical system in contact with a thermal bath. In analogy with the standard protocol employed to analyze aging, we study the response of a system to a sudden change of the bath…
Molecular dynamics simulations of a quasi-harmonic solid are conducted to elucidate the meaning of temperature fluctuations in canonical systems and validate a well-known but frequently contested equation predicting the mean square of such…
We study the real-time dynamics of quantum models with long-range interactions coupled to a heat-bath within the closed-time path-integral formalism. We show that quantum fluctuations depress the transition temperature. In the subcritical…
The standard {\em system-plus-reservoir} approach used in the study of dissipative systems can be meaningfully generalized to a dissipative coupling involving the momentum, instead of the coordinate: the corresponding equation of motion…
Vapor bubbles are formed in liquids by two mechanisms: evaporation (temperature above the boiling threshold) and cavitation (pressure below the vapor pressure). The liquid resists in these metastable (overheating and tensile, respectively)…
In this work the TFD formalism is explored in order to study a dissipative time-dependent thermal vacuum. This state is a consequence of a particular interaction between two theories, which can be interpreted as two conformal theories…
The thermal history of a large class of running vacuum models in which the effective cosmological term is described by a truncated power series of the Hubble rate, whose dominant term is $\Lambda (H) \propto H^{n+2}$, is discussed in…