Related papers: Finite Temperature Resonant Tunneling in False Vac…
Determining the phase diagram of interacting quantum many-body systems is an important task for a wide range of problems such as the understanding and design of quantum materials. For classical equilibrium systems, the Lee-Yang formalism…
We derive the finite-temperature quantum-tunneling rate from first principles. The rate depends on both real- and imaginary-time; we demonstrate that the relevant instantons should therefore be defined on a Schwinger-Keldysh contour, and…
One possible way in which phase transitions in the early universe may have ocurred is via nucleation of bubbles of the new phase (true vacuum) in the old phase (false vacuum). The technique most widely used to compute the probability of…
Temperature plays a crucial role in metastable phenomena, not only by contributing to determine the state (phase) of a system, but also ruling the decay probability to more stable states. Such a situation is encountered in many different…
We recently investigated the nature of resonant tunnelling in standard scalar Quantum Field Theory, uncovering the conditions required for resonance. It was shown that whereas the homogeneous false vacuum may decay via bubble nucleation, it…
Instanton theory relates the rate constant for tunneling through a barrier to the periodic classical trajectory on the upturned potential energy surface whose period is $\tau=\hbar/(k_{\rm B}T)$. Unfortunately, the standard theory is only…
In the tight binding model with multiple degenerate vacua we might treat wave function overlaps as instanton tunnelings between different wells (vacua). An amplitude for such a tunneling process might be constructed as $\mathsf{T}_{i\to…
A first-order, confinement/deconfinement phase transition appears in the finite temperature behavior of many non-Abelian gauge theories. These theories play an important role in proposals for completion of the Standard Model of particle…
The temperature dependance of the action in the thin-wall and thick-wall limits is obtained analytically for the $\phi^6$ scalar potential. The nature of the phase transition is investigated from the quantum tunnelling regime at low…
In $N+1$ dimensions, false vacuum decay at zero temperature is dominated by the $O(N+1)$ symmetric instanton, a sphere of radius $R_0$, whereas at temperatures $T>>R_0^{-1}$, the decay is dominated by a `cylindrical' (static) $O(N)$…
We analyze vacuum tunneling in quantum field theory in a general formalism by using the Wigner representation. In the standard instanton formalism, one usually approximates the initial false vacuum state by an eigenstate of the field…
Lee-Yang phase transition theory is a milestone in statistical physics. Its applications in realistic systems, however, had been substantially hindered by availability of practical schemes to calculate the Lee-Yang zeros. In this…
We study the contribution of finite energy tunneling to the total vacuum transition rate in a system at finite temperature. We find that in certain models, such as the 1+1 Abelian Higgs model, the quantum contribution is non-negligible even…
The decay rate for a particle in a metastable cubic potential is investigated in the quantum regime by the Euclidean path integral method in semiclassical approximation. The imaginary time formalism allows one to monitor the system as a…
The semiclassical formalism for numerical calculation of the rate of tunneling transitions induced by N particles with total energy E of order or higher than the height of the barrier is developed. The formalism is applied to the induced…
Semiclassical instanton theory is a form of quantum transition-state theory which can be applied to computing thermal reaction rates for complex molecular systems including quantum tunneling effects. There have been a number of attempts to…
A reformulation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem of Callen and Welton is presented in such a manner that the basic idea of Feynman-Vernon and Caldeira -Leggett of using an infinite number of oscillators to simulate the dissipative…
Using a powerful combination of Coleman's instanton technique and the method of Banks and Bender, the exponential factor for the zero temperature rate of tunneling out of metastable vacuum in a system of two identical capacitively coupled…
A pure Yang-Mills theory extended by addition of a quartic term is considered in order to study the transition from the quantum tunneling regime to that of classical, i.e. thermal, behaviour. The periodic field configurations are found,…
We study the Josephson-like interlayer tunneling signature of the strongly correlated $\nu_T = 1$ quantum Hall phase in bilayer two-dimensional electron systems as a function of the layer separation, temperature and interlayer charge…