Related papers: Thermal False Vacuum Decay Is More Than It Seems
Quantum oscillators prepared out of thermal equilibrium can be used to produce work and transmit information. By intensive cooling of a single oscillator, its thermal energy deterministically dissipates to a colder environment, and the…
We study the problem of the approach to equilibrium in a macroscopic quantum system in an abstract setting. We prove that, for a typical choice of "nonequilibrium subspace", any initial state (from the energy shell) thermalizes, and in fact…
The false vacuum decay in field theory from a coherently oscillating initial state is studied for $\phi^6$ potential. An oscillating bubble solution is obtained. The instantaneous bubble nucleation rate is calculated.
The current experimentally measured parameters of the Standard Model (SM) suggest that our Universe lies in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the Higgs field is prone to vacuum decay to a lower state with catastrophic consequences. Our…
Simulations are performed of a small quantum system interacting with a quantum environment. The system consists of various initial states of two harmonic oscillators coupled to give normal modes. The environment is "designed" by its level…
The relationship between the vanishing of the heat capacities as $T\to0^+$ and the thermal stability is examined. The heat capacities vanish as fast as or faster than $T$ as $T\to0^+$ for states at the phase space boundary ($T=0$) to…
False vacuum decay in quantum mechanical first order phase transitions is a phenomenon with wide implications in cosmology, and presents interesting theoretical challenges. In the standard approach, it is assumed that false vacuum decay…
We recently investigated the nature of resonant tunnelling in standard scalar Quantum Field Theory, uncovering the conditions required for resonance. It was shown that whereas the homogeneous false vacuum may decay via bubble nucleation, it…
The electroweak phase transition and the sphaleron decoupling condition in the MSSM are revisited taking the latest experimental data into account. The light Higgs boson scenario and the ordinary decoupling limit which are classified by the…
The decay of a metastable system is described by extending Kramers' method to the quantal regime. For temperatures above twice the crossover value we recover the result known from applying Euclidean path integrals to solvable models. Our…
The Brownian motion of a quantum particle in a harmonic confining potential and coupled to a harmonic quantum thermal bath is exactly solvable. It is shown that at low enough temperatures the stationary state is non-Gibbsian due to an…
Nucleation is an out-of-equilibrium process, which can be strongly affected by the presence of external fields. In this letter, we report a simple extension of classical nucleation theory to systems submitted to an homogeneous shear flow.…
This is the second of a series of three papers examining how viable it is for entanglement to be sustained at high temperatures for quantum systems in thermal equilibrium (Case A), in nonequilibrium (Case B) and in nonequilibrium steady…
The observed stability of nanobubbles contradicts the well-known result in classical nucleation theory, that the critical radius is both microscopic and thermodynamically unstable. Here nanoscopic stability is shown to be the combined…
Quantum entanglement is commonly assumed to be fragile at ambient temperature and over macroscopic distances, where thermal noise and dissipation are expected to rapidly suppress nonclassical correlations. Here we show that this intuition…
During (re)heating of the universe after inflation, the relativistic decay products of the inflaton field $\phi$ must lose energy and additional particles must be produced to attain a thermalised state at a temperature $T_{\reh}$. We…
We show that contrary to the claim made by Hallin and Liljenberg in Phys. Rev. D52 1150,(1995), (hep-th/9412188) the thermal correction to the thermal decay or pair production rate for a system placed in a heat bath in the presence of an…
We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false…
To calculate the temperature at which a first-order cosmological phase transition occurs, one must calculate $F_c(T)$, the free energy of a critical bubble configuration. $F_c(T)$ is often approximated by the classical energy plus an…
We show that gravitational interactions between massless thermal modes and a nucleating Coleman-de Luccia bubble may lead to efficient decoherence and strongly suppress metastable vacuum decay for bubbles that are small compared to the…