Related papers: False vacuum decay with gravity in a critical case
In the present mainstream cosmology, matter and spacetime emerged from a singularity and evolved through four distinct periods: early inflation, radiation, dark matter and late-time inflation (driven by dark energy). During the radiation…
A procedure is reported for numerical analysis of false vacuum transition in a model with multiple scalar fields. It is a refined version of the approach by Konstandin and Huber. The alteration makes it possible to tackle a class of…
We investigate the bounce solutions in vacuum decay problems. We show that it is possible to have a stable false vacuum in a potential that is unbounded from below.
We obtain effective equations of inflationary dynamics for the mean inflaton and metric fields in the no-boundary and tunneling quantum states of the Universe. In the slow roll approximation (taking the form of the local Schwiger-DeWitt…
Our current measurements of the Standard Model parameters imply that the Higgs field resides in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the vacuum can decay to a lower ground state, with cataclysmic repercussions for our Universe. According…
We deal with a dynamical mechanism in which a large cosmological constant, as suggested by inflationary scenarios, decays due to expansion of the universe. This mechanism has its origin in the gravitational coupling of the vacuum density.…
Recent analysis shows that if the 125-126 GeV LHC resonance turns out to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, the electroweak vacuum would be a metastable state at 98% C.L. In this paper we argue that, during inflation, the electroweak vacuum…
We identify an infinite class of unbounded potentials for which the Coleman instantons do not exist in D-dimensional spacetime. For such potentials, the decay of a false vacuum is described by the new instantons introduced in [5,6,4]. For…
Inflation is a necessary cosmic mechanism to cure basic inconsistencies of the standard model of cosmology. These problems are usually `fixed' by postulating the existence of a scalar field (called the ``inflaton''). However, other less ad…
The false vacuum is a metastable state that can occur in quantum field theory, and its decay was first studied semi-classically by Coleman. In this work we consider the 1+1 dimensional $\varphi^4$ theory, which is the simplest model that…
In hep-th/0506040 we discussed a classically constrained model of gravity. This theory contains known solutions of General Relativity (GR), and admits solutions that are absent in GR. Here we study cosmological implications of some of these…
Theories with compact extra dimensions are sometimes unstable to decay into a bubble of nothing -- an instability resulting in the destruction of spacetime. We investigate the existence of these bubbles in theories where the moduli fields…
We study the effects of gravitationally-driven decoherence on tunneling processes associated with false vacuum decays, such as the Coleman--De~Luccia instanton. We compute the thermal graviton-induced decoherence rate for a wave function…
Classicalons are self-bound classical field configurations, which include black holes in General Relativity. In quantum theory, they are described by condensates of many soft quanta. In this work, their decay properties are studied in…
False vacuum decay in quantum mechanical first order phase transitions is a phenomenon with wide implications in cosmology, and presents interesting theoretical challenges. In the standard approach, it is assumed that false vacuum decay…
The role of an exponential function of the scalar curvature in the modified gravity is analyzed. Two models are proposed. A toy model that complies with local and cosmological constraints and gives appropriate qualitative description of the…
We consider the Skyrme model modified by the addition of mass terms which explicitly break chiral symmetry and pick out a specific point on the model's target space as the unique true vacuum. However, they also allow the possibility of…
Motivated by recent studies of the one-bubble inflationary universe scenario that predicts a low density, negative curvature universe, we investigate the Euclidean vacuum mode functions of a scalar field in a spatially open chart of de…
Properties of unstable false vacuum states are analyzed from the point of view of the quantum theory of unstable states. Some of false vacuum states survive up to times when their survival probability has a non-exponential form. At times…
We investigate the relaxation and decay of a particle during inflation by implementing the dynamical renormalization group. This investigation allows us to give a meaningful definition for the decay rate in an expanding universe. As a…