Related papers: Bubble Nucleation from Boson Star Collapse
We propose that the cosmological gamma ray bursts arise from the collapse of neutron stars to black holes triggered by collisions or mergers with main sequence stars. This scenario represents a cosmological history qualitatively different…
The explosion mechanism of core-collapse supernovae is a long-standing problem in stellar astrophysics. We briefly outline the main contenders for a solution and review recent efforts to model core-collapse supernova explosions by means of…
It is known that there is a quantum mechanical tunneling process which, through nucleation of a membrane, induces a transition between two de Sitter spaces, lowering the cosmological constant. It is shown in this paper that a different,…
Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the cosmic inflation. When inflation ends, the bubbles run into the ambient plasma, producing strong shocks followed by underdensity waves, which propagate outwards. The bubbles themselves…
We show that particle production during the expansion of bubbles of true vacuum in the sea of false vacuum is possible and calculate the resulting rate. As a result the nucleated bubbles cannot expand due to the transfer of false vacuum…
We consider the effect of inhomogeneities on the rate of false vacuum decay. Modelling the inhomogeneity by a black hole, we construct explicit Euclidean instantons which describe the nucleation of a bubble of true vacuum centred on the…
Understanding gravitational collapse requires understanding how $\sim 10^{58}$ nucleons can be destroyed in $\sim 10^{-5}$ seconds. The recent proposal that the endpoint of gravitational collapse can be a "dark energy star" implies that the…
The death of massive stars is shrouded in many mysteries. One of them is the mechanism that overturns the collapse of the degenerate iron core into an explosion, a process that determines the supernova explosion energy, properties of the…
Vacuum bubbles, formed in first order phase transitions, have important implications for cosmology. In particular, they source gravitational waves. Usually, it is assumed that, once bubbles are materialized, their state, further evolution…
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…
The explosion of core-collapse supernova depends on a sequence of events taking place in less than a second in a region of a few hundred kilometers at the center of a supergiant star, after the stellar core approaches the Chandrasekhar mass…
Repulsive interactions between neutrons in compact stellar cores cause luminosity and a steady outflow of hydrogen from stellar surfaces. Neutron repulsion in more massive compact objects made by gravitational collapse produces violent,…
We report on a novel phenomenon of particle cosmology, which features specific cosmological phase transitions via quantum tunnelings through multiple vacua. The latter is inspired by the axiverse ideas and enables us to probe the associated…
Core-collapse supernovae are among the most fascinating phenomena in astrophysics and provide a formidable challenge for theoretical investigation. They mark the spectacular end of the lives of massive stars and, in an explosive eruption,…
Gamma-ray bursts are believed to result from the coalescence of binary neutron stars. However, the standard proposals for conversion of the gravitational energy to thermal energy have difficulties. We show that if the merger of the two…
Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. After inflation ends, the bubbles quickly dissipate their kinetic energy; they come to rest with respect to the Hubble flow and eventually form…
Boson stars, hypothetical astrophysical objects bound by the self-gravity of a scalar field, have been widely studied as a type of exotic compact object that is horizonless and provides a testing ground for physics beyond the Standard…
We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to simulate the formation of a massive (10^6Msun) stellar cluster system formed from the gravitational collapse of a turbulent molecular cloud. We investigate the hierarchical clustering properties of…
Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known and are common in both early- and late-type galaxies. They exhibit scaling relations with their host galaxy which may be related to those of supermassive black holes. These…
The thermal nucleation of quark matter bubbles inside neutron stars is examined for various temperatures which the star may realistically encounter during its lifetime. It is found that for a bag constant less than a critical value, a very…