Related papers: Thermal False Vacuum Decay Is More Than It Seems
We study the internal dynamics of an elementary quantum system placed close to a body held at a temperature different from that of the surrounding radiation. We derive general expressions for lifetime and density matrix valid for bodies of…
One possible way in which phase transitions in the early universe may have ocurred is via nucleation of bubbles of the new phase (true vacuum) in the old phase (false vacuum). The technique most widely used to compute the probability of…
A recent analysis of the false-vacuum decay in non-perturbative regimes is here extended in the presence of Einstein gravity, computing the corresponding effective potential and decay rate. We consider a $\lambda \phi^4$ scalar field theory…
We calculate the dissipation rate of a coherently oscillating scalar field in a thermal environment using nonequilibrium quantum field theory and apply it to the reheating stage after cosmic inflation. It is shown that the rate is…
In thermal equilibrium, the fluctuation-dissipation theorem relates the linear response and correlation functions in a model and observable independent fashion. Out of equilibrium, these relations still hold if the equilibrium temperature…
In supersymmetric theories a field can develop a vacuum expectation value $M \gg 10^3\,{\rm GeV}$, even though its mass $m$ is of order $10^2$ to $10^3\,{\rm GeV}$. The finite temperature in the early Universe can hold such a field at zero,…
A generalized theory of open quantum systems combined with mean-field theory is used to study a superconducting wire in contact with thermal baths at different temperatures. It is shown that, depending on the temperature of the colder bath,…
This work continues the investigation in two recent papers on the quantum thermodynamics of spacetimes, 1) placing what was studied in [1] for thermal quantum fields in the context of early universe cosmology, and 2) extending the…
We study the thermalization of an elementary quantum system modeled by a two-level atom interacting with stationary electromagnetic fields out of thermal equilibrium near a dielectric slab. The slab is held at a temperature different from…
We study real-time nucleation in perturbative high-temperature quantum field theories. Specifically, we incorporate the evolution of thermally fluctuating plasma driven out of equilibrium by nucleation. This plasma forms the thermal bath…
We study how temperature affects the lifetime of a quantized, persistent current state in a toroidal Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). When the temperature is increased, we find a decrease in the persistent current lifetime. Comparing our…
The correlations of the free-energy landscape of mean-field spin glasses at different temperatures are investigated, concentrating on models with a first order freezing transition. Using a ``potential function'' we follow the metastable…
The nucleation and evolution of bubbles are investigated in the model of an $O(3)$-symmetric scalar field coupled to gravity in the high temperature limit. It is shown that, in addition to the well-known bubble of which the inside region is…
We investigate chaotic inflation models with two scalar fields, such that one field (the inflaton) rolls while the other is trapped in a false vacuum state. The false vacuum becomes unstable when the inflaton field falls below some critical…
We investigate the thermodynamics of integrable classical field theories under the effect of a random initial configuration, motivated by the nonequilibrium evolution of quantum field theories. The approach to thermal equilibrium is…
Emulating thermal observables on a digital quantum computer is essential for quantum simulation of many-body physics. However, thermalization typically requires a large system size due to incorporating a thermal bath, whilst limited…
We study the decay of the false vacuum in the scaling Ising and tricritical Ising field theories using the Truncated Conformal Space Approach and compare the numerical results to theoretical predictions in the thin wall limit. In the Ising…
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…
The possibility of maintaining entanglement in a quantum system at finite, even high, temperatures -- the so-called `hot entanglement' -- has obvious practical interest, but also requires closer theoretical scrutiny. Since quantum…
The thermodynamic behavior of a decaying vacuum cosmology describing the entire cosmological history evolving between two extreme (early and late time) de Sitter eras is investigated. The thermal evolution from the early de Sitter to the…