Related papers: Instabilities in scale-separated Casimir vacua
The Euclidean or Bunch-Davies O(4,1) invariant 'vacuum' state of quantum fields in global de Sitter space is shown to be unstable to small perturbations, even for a massive free field with no self-interactions. There are perturbations of…
We study stable surfaces, i.e., second order minima of the area for variations of fixed volume, in sub-Riemannian space forms of dimension $3$. We prove a stability inequality and provide sufficient conditions ensuring instability of…
We analyse the classical stability of the model proposed by Maggiore and Mancarella, where gravity is modified by a term $\sim m^2 R \Box^{-2} R$ to produce the late-time acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Our study takes into…
Galaxies exhibit a variety of non-axisymmetric structure (bars, spiral structure, lopsided structure, etc.). These suggest the following general problem: what are the possible stationary configurations of a two-dimensional self-gravitating…
Our previous article [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 060401 (2010)] predicted that Casimir forces induced by the material-dispersion properties of certain dielectrics can give rise to stable configurations of objects. This phenomenon was illustrated…
This paper examines the classical dynamics of false vacuum regions embedded in surrounding regions of true vacuum, in the thin-wall limit. The dynamics of all generally relativistically allowed solutions -- most but not all of which have…
We evaluate the Hadamard function, the vacuum expectation values (VEVs) of the field squared and the energy-momentum tensor for a massive scalar field with general curvature coupling parameter in the geometry of two parallel plates on a…
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…
In this paper we study M-theory compactifications on seven-dimensional manifolds with SU(3) structure. As such manifolds naturally pick out a specific direction, the resulting effective theory can be cast into a form which is similar to…
Systems such as fluid flows in channels and pipes or the complex Ginzburg-Landau system, defined over periodic domains, exhibit both continuous symmetries, translational and rotational, as well as discrete symmetries under spatial…
We perform a thorough study of the theoretical consistency of recently proposed, viable, quadratic modifications of gravity that are functions of the the Gauss-Bonnet invariant, regarding the stability of their perturbations around vacuum,…
We study a metric cubic gravity theory considering odd-parity modes of linear inhomogeneous perturbations on a spatially homogeneous Bianchi type I manifold close to the isotropic de Sitter spacetime. We show that in the regime of small…
We present calculations of the variance of fluctuations and of the mean of the energy momentum tensor of a massless scalar field for the Minkowski and Casimir vacua as a function of an intrinsic scale defined by a smeared field or by point…
We show that every finite volume hyperbolic manifold of dimension greater or equal to 3 is stable under rescaled Ricci flow, i.e. that every small perturbation of the hyperbolic metric flows back to the hyperbolic metric again. Note that we…
Graviton loop corrections to observables in de Sitter space often lead to infrared divergences. We show that these infrared divergences are resolved by the spontaneous breaking of de Sitter invariance.
All non-twisting Petrov-type N solutions of vacuum Einstein field equations with cosmological constant Lambda are summarized. They are shown to belong either to the non-expanding Kundt class or to the expanding Robinson-Trautman class.…
We study the stability of Freund-Rubin compactifications, AdS_p x M_q, of p+q-dimensional gravity theories with a q-form field strength and no cosmological term. We show that the general AdS_p x S^q vacuum is classically stable against…
We propose a classification of bifurcations of Vlasov equations, based on the strength of the resonance between the unstable mode and the continuous spectrum on the imaginary axis. We then identify and characterize a new type of generic…
We present a concrete string-theoretic mechanism that generates four-dimensional de Sitter vacua from non-geometric R-flux compactifications of heterotic string theory. The construction rests on three pillars: the Malcev algebra generated…
We calculate the universal part of the free energy of certain finite two- dimensional regions at criticality by use of conformal field theory. Two geometries are considered: a section of a circle ("pie slice") of angle \phi and a helical…