Related papers: Decay of Metastable States: Sharp Transition from …
We study thermal effects on a decay process of a false vacuum in type IIA string theory. At finite temperature, the potential of the theory is corrected and also thermally excited modes enhance the decay rate. The false vacuum can…
The dynamics of weak vs. strong first order phase transitions is investigated numerically for 2+1 dimensional scalar field models. It is argued that the change from a weak to a strong transition is itself a (second order) phase transition,…
We review the non-zero temperature relaxational dynamics of quantum systems near a zero temperature, second-order phase transition. We begin with the quantum Ising chain, for which universal and exact results for the relaxation rates can be…
A microscopic description is given for the behavior of the fluid system in an immediate vicinity of its critical point, where theoretical and experimental researches are difficult to carry out. For the temperatures $T<T_c$, the regions of…
We study the quantum melting of stripe phases in models with competing short range and long range interactions decaying with distance as $1/r^{\sigma}$ in two space dimensions. At zero temperature we find a two step disordering of the…
We measure quantum and thermal phase-slip rates using the standard deviation of the switching current in superconducting nanowires at high bias current. Our rigorous quantitative analysis provides firm evidence for the presence of quantum…
A molecular dynamics simulation is performed for a supercooled liquid of rigid diatomic molecules. The time-dependent self and collective density correlators of the molecular centers of mass are determined and compared with the predictions…
Two-particle tunneling in synchronous and asynchronous regimes is studied in the framework of dissipative quantum tunneling. We show that the use of the proposed model is justified by a comparison with realistic potential energy surfaces of…
Coulomb blockade phenomena and quantum fluctuations are studied in mesoscopic metallic tunnel junctions with high charging energies. If the resistance of the barriers is large compared to the quantum resistance, transport can be described…
We study the effects of smooth inhomogeneities at first-order transitions. We show that a temperature gradient at a thermally-driven first-order transition gives rise to nontrivial universal scaling behaviors with respect to the length…
Lattice QCD calculations have shown that the transition from hadrons to quarks and gluons is a rapid crossover at $T = 155-160$ MeV at vanishing chemical potential. Many model calculations show that the transition is first-order at…
We explore dissipative quantum tunnelling, a phenomenon central to various physical and chemical processes, using a double-well potential model. This paper aims to bridge gaps in understanding the crossover from thermal activation to…
The quantum first-detection problem concerns the statistics of the time at which a system, subject to repeated measurements, is observed in a prescribed target state for the first time. Unlike its classical counterpart, the measurement back…
When considering magnetic systems in the thermodynamic limit and at low enough temperature, one finds typically magnetically ordered phases. In contrast, in the high-temperature regime, the interactions between the spin degrees of freedom…
The puzzling behavior of the transition phase through a quantum dot can be understood in a natural way via a formation of the electron molecule in the quantum dot. In this case the resonance tunneling takes place through the…
In the framework of open quantum systems, we study the internal dynamics of both freely falling and static two-level atoms interacting with quantized conformally coupled massless scalar field in de Sitter spacetime. We find that the atomic…
We analyze the spontaneous switching between the two N\'eel states of Fe chains on Cu$_2$N/Cu(100), experimentally studied by Loth et al. [Science 335, 196 (2012)]. We show that, in the experimental low-temperature regime (T ~ 1K),…
We investigate the loss of adiabaticity when cooling a many-body quantum system from an initial thermal state toward a quantum critical point. The excitation density, which quantifies the degree of adiabaticity of the dynamics, is found to…
Classical transition state theory (TST) is the cornerstone of reaction rate theory. It postulates a partition of phase space into reactant and product regions, which are separated by a dividing surface that reactive trajectories must cross.…
We present results of extensive quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the three-dimensional (3D) S=1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Finite-size scaling of the spin stiffness and the sublattice magnetization gives the critical temperature Tc/J =…