Related papers: A Unified View of Vacuum Decay Channels
Singularity of the potential function makes quantum tunneling problem mathematically underdetermined. To circumvent the difficulties it introduced in physics, a potential singularity cutoff is often used, followed by a reverse limit…
We describe a new family of thin-wall instantons, with negative tension bubble walls, that mediate tunneling between Minkowski or de Sitter vacua. Some of these instantons can have exponentially enhanced tunneling rates, and would dominate…
The tunneling wave function of the universe is calculated exactly for a de Sitter minisuperspace model with a massless conformally coupled scalar field, both by solving the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and by evaluating the Lorentzian path…
Theories with compact extra dimensions are sometimes unstable to decay into a bubble of nothing -- an instability resulting in the destruction of spacetime. We investigate the existence of these bubbles in theories where the moduli fields…
A standard approach to analyzing tunneling processes in various physical contexts is to use instanton or imaginary time path techniques. For systems in which the tunneling takes place in a time dependent setting, the standard methods are…
We revisit a mechanism proposed by Hawking to resolve the cosmological constant problem (and the controversy it generated) to identify possibly more palatable alternatives and explore new connections and interpretations. In particular,…
We investigate the properties of a class of mode-coupling equations for the glass transition where the density mode decays into multiple relaxation channels. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the solutions for Newtonian as well as…
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…
We propose a new approach for computing tunneling rates in quantum or thermal field theory with multiple scalar fields. It is based on exact analytical solutions of piecewise linear potentials with many segments that describes any given…
We study zero-temperature false vacuum decay in $D$ compact spatial dimensions and show that for volumes below a critical value a new bounce solution, different from Coleman's celebrated $O(D)$ bubble, mediates the decay process, and…
It was recently shown that tunneling wavefunction proposal is consistent with loop quantum geometry corrections including both holonomy and inverse scale factor corrections in the gravitational part of a spatially closed isotropic model…
We point out that the (pseudo-)conformal Universe scenario may be realized as decay of conformally invariant, metastable vacuum, which proceeds via spontaneous nucleation and subsequent growth of a bubble of a putative new phase. We study…
In the absence of gravity, one can prove that tunnelling instantons exhibit exactly one negative mode in their spectrum of fluctuations. It is precisely the existence of this tunnelling negative mode that warrants an interpretation of these…
We find the novel effect on the decay of a false vacuum in view of quantum field theory, which is induced by a field coupling to the scalar field related to a first-order phase transition. This effect of the environment can never be…
Within the so-called scaled quantum theory, the standard bouncing ball problem is analyzed under the presence of a gravitational field and harmonic potential. In this framework, the quantum-classical transition of the density matrix is…
We study the effects of Goldstone modes on the stability of the vacuum in a $U(1)$ theory for a complex scalar field. The dynamics of the field resemble those of Keplerian motion in the presence of time-dependent friction, whose equations…
We investigate the macroscopic quantum tunneling of the attractive Bose-Einstein condensate. Within the effective Lagrangian framework, we find bounce solutions and explicitly calculate the decay rate of the condensate trapped in a…
In the thin-wall approximation, the decay of a gravitating false vacuum to a lower-energy state is affected by the cosmological horizon structure in both spaces. The nucleation radius of a bubble of true vacuum depends on the surface…
We consider localized soliton-like solutions in the presence of a stable scalar condensate background. By the analogy with classical mechanics, it can be shown that there may exist solutions of the nonlinear equations of motion that…
The tunneling Hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wavefunctions. Here, we apply a generalization of the way we formed appropriate wave…