Related papers: Vacuum bubbles from cosmic ripples
The valley structure associated with quantum meta-stability is examined. It is defined by the new valley equation, which enables consistent evaluation of the imaginary-time path-integral. We study the structure of this new valley equation…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. It has been claimed that this leads to a significant…
One of the key observables in a gravitational wave power spectrum from a first order phase transition in the early Universe is the mean bubble spacing, which depends on the rate of nucleation of bubbles of the stable phase, as well as the…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
It is generally argued that most clusters of galaxies host cooling flows in which radiative cooling in the centre causes a slow inflow. However, recent observations by Chandra and XMM conflict with the predicted cooling flow rates. Here we…
The ekpyrotic and cyclic universe scenarios have revived the idea that the density perturbations apparent in today's universe could have been generated in a `pre-singularity' epoch before the big bang. These scenarios provide explicit…
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…
False vacuum decay is a potential mechanism governing the evolution of the early Universe, with profound connections to non-equilibrium quantum physics, including quenched dynamics, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, and dynamical metastability.…
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and…
Theories with more than one vacuum allow quantum transitions between them, which may proceed via bubble nucleation; theories with more than two vacua posses additional decay modes in which the wall of a bubble may further decay. The…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. We examine the evolution and collision of slow-moving…
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…
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…
We analyse vacuum decay in rotating BTZ black hole spacetimes with the thin wall approximation. Possible parameter regions for the vacuum decay are clarified. We find that the nucleation rate is dominated by the bounce solution with the…
The dynamics of false vacuum decay at the end of inflation is studied. It is shown that the creation of a new phase is mainly stimulated by temperature fluctuations. Moving walls of O(3)-symmetric bubbles weakly interact with their…
In this work we study vacuum decay and bubble nucleation in models of $f(R)$ higher curvature gravity. Building upon the analysis of Coleman-De Luccia (CDL), we present the formalism to calculate the Euclidean action and the bounce solution…
We develop a set of controlled, analytic approximations to study the effects of bubble collisions on cosmology. We expand the initial perturbation to the inflaton field caused by the collision in a general power series, and determine its…
Many theories of the early universe predict the existence of a multiverse where bubbles continuously nucleate giving rise to observers in their interior. In this paper, we point out that topological defects of several dimensionalities will…
The cosmological remnants of a first-order phase transition generally depend on the perturbations that the walls of expanding bubbles originate in the plasma. Several of the formation mechanisms occur when bubbles collide and lose their…
The interior of a vacuum bubble in de Sitter space may give an open universe with sufficient homogeneity to agree with observations. Here, previous work by Bucher, Goldhaber and Turok is extended to describe a thin bubble wall with nonzero…