Related papers: Decay of Metastable States: Sharp Transition from …
We show theoretically the existence of a metastable state and the possibility of decay to the ground state through macroscopic quantum tunneling in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates with repulsive interactions. Numerical analysis of…
The quantum decay of a metastable vacuum is exponentially suppressed by a tunneling action that can be calculated in the semi-classical approximation as the Euclidean action of a bounce that interpolates between the false and true phases.…
Thermal escape out of a metastable well is considered in the weak friction regime, where the bottleneck for decay is energy diffusion, and at lower temperatures, where quantum tunneling becomes relevant. Within a systematic semiclassical…
Metastable strings can arise from a two-step symmetry breaking chain of the type $SU(2) \to U(1) \to 1$.They can decay through quantum tunneling by nucleating a monopole-antimonopole pair, and are prominent candidates for explaining the…
The initial time-dependence of a state in circumstances where it makes transitions to, or decay to, a second state has been investigated. In classical stochastic processes, the observed time dependence of transition or decay proportional to…
We describe our perspective on the Structural Glass Transition (SGT) problem built on the premise that a viable theory must provide a consistent picture of the dynamics and statics, which are manifested by large increase in shear viscosity…
We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…
We consider the general scenario of an excited level |i> of a quantum system that can decay via two channels: (i) via a single-quantum jump to an intermediate, resonant level |bar m>, followed by a second single-quantum jump to a final…
The dynamics of first order phase transitions are studied in the context of (3+1)-dimensional scalar field theories. Particular attention is paid to the question of quantifying the strength of the transition, and how `weak' and `strong'…
The transition between the two phases of 4D Euclidean Dynamical Triangulation [1] was long believed to be of second order until in 1996 first order behavior was found for sufficiently large systems [3,4]. However, one may wonder if this…
We investigate the effects of dissipation on the quantum dynamics of many-body systems at quantum transitions, especially considering those of the first order. This issue is studied within the paradigmatic one-dimensional quantum Ising…
Discontinuous quantum phase transitions besides their general interest are clearly relevant to the study of heavy fermions and magnetic transition metal compounds. Recent results show that in many systems belonging to these classes of…
The recently discovered universal scaling relation between the superconducting density and the transition temperature in high-temperature superconductors appears to indicate that those normal state carriers that are undergoing a…
We present a study of the decay of metastable states of a scalar field via thermal activation, in the presence of a finite density of fermions. The process we consider is the nucleation of ``{\it droplets}'' of true vacuum inside the false…
Equilibrium statistical physics is applied to layered neural networks with differentiable activation functions. A first analysis of off-line learning in soft-committee machines with a finite number (K) of hidden units learning a perfectly…
We contrast two sets of conditions that govern the transition in which classical dynamics emerges from the evolution of a quantum system. The first was derived by considering the trajectories seen by an observer (dubbed the ``strong''…
We consider the effect of droplet excitations in the random first order transition theory of glasses on the configurational entropy. The contribution of these excitations is estimated both at and above the ideal glass transition…
In high spin molecules metal ions are coupled by ferro or antiferromagnetic short range interactions so that their magnetic moments are parallel or antiparallel to each other at temperatures (T) much smaller than the coupling constant J.…
For suitable parameters, the classical Duffing oscillator has a known bistability in its stationary states, with low- and high-amplitude branches. As expected from the analogy with a particle in a double-well potential, transitions between…
A classical system cannot escape out of a metastable state at zero temperature. However, a composite system made from both classical and quantum degrees of freedom may drag itself out of the metastable state by a sequential process. The…