Related papers: Is our vacuum stable?
One hope to solve the cosmological constant problem is to identify a symmetry principle, based on which the cosmological constant can be reduced either to zero, or to a tiny value. Here, we note that requiring that the vacuum state is…
We consider the possibility that the gauge hierarchy is a byproduct of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum, i.e., that whatever mechanism is responsible for the latter also sets the running Higgs mass to a value smaller than its…
Production of gravitational vacuum defects and their contribution to the energy density of our Universe are discussed. These topological microstructures (defects) could be produced in the result of creation of the Universe from "nothing"…
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…
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…
Thermodynamical stability of fluid spheres is studied in the presence of a cosmological constant, both in the Newtonian limit, as well as in General Relativity. In all cases, an increase of the cosmological constant tends to stabilize the…
Vacuum decay posits that the universe's apparent vacuum is metastable and could transition to a lower-energy state. According to current physics models, if such a transition occurred in any location, a region of "true vacuum" would…
Quantum theory, general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and the $\Lambda$CDM model of cosmology have all been spectacularly successful within their respective regimes of applicability, but many central problems remain…
The quantum decay of a relativistic scalar field from a metastable state ("false vacuum decay") is a fundamental idea in quantum field theory and cosmology. This occurs via local formation of bubbles of true vacuum with their subsequent…
From the axiom of the unrestricted repeatability of all experiments, Bondi and Gold argued that the universe is in a stable, self-perpetuating equilibrium state. This concept generalizes the usual cosmological principle to the perfect…
A very simple wormhole geometry is considered as a model of a mode of topological fluctutation in Planck-scale spacetime foam. Quantum dynamics of the hole reduces to quantum mechanics of one variable, throat radius, and admits a WKB…
In this work we analyse the potential for a warp drive spacetime to develop instabilities due to the presence of quantum matter. Particularly, we look for points of infinite blueshift (which are analogous to points of a black hole inner…
In a pioneering paper on the role of gravity on false vacuum decay, Coleman and De Luccia showed that a strong gravitational field can stabilize the false vacuum, suppressing the formation of true vacuum bubbles. This result is obtained for…
The main objective of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of the bouncing scenario of the universe. The most widely recognized cosmological framework is the standard cosmological model, sometimes referred to as the Big Bang model.…
Vacuum compactifications may suffer from instabilities under small perturbations or tunnel effects; both are difficult to analyze. In this paper we consider the issue from a higher-dimensional perspective. We first look at how stability…
Fireballs are an essential part of any cosmological $\gamma$-ray burst. We drive here a stability criterion for fireballs and show that fireballs are Rayleigh-Taylor unstable in any region in which the entropy decreases outward. The…
We examine the descent via membrane nucleation through a landscape of vacua where the cosmological constant is given by a combination of four-form fluxes. It has been shown that this descent can be slowed exponentially for very low…
The cosmological constant, i.e., the energy density stored in the true vacuum state of all existing fields in the Universe, is the simplest and the most natural possibility to describe the current cosmic acceleration. However, despite its…
We construct the first dynamically stable ergostars (equilibrium neutron stars that contain an ergoregion) for a compressible, causal equation of state. We demonstrate their stability by evolving both strict and perturbed equilibrium…
In this paper we examine the stability of scalar perturbations in nonsingular models which emerge from an interacting vacuum component. The analysis developed in this paper relies on two phenomenological choices for the energy exchange…