Related papers: False Vacuum Decay With Gravity in Non-Thin-Wall L…
An alternate formalism is developed to determine the energy eigenvalues of quantum mechanical systems, confined within a rigid impenetrable spherical box of radius $r_0$, in the framework of Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation.…
There is a single negative mode in the spectrum of small perturbations about the tunneling solutions describing a metastable vacuum decay in flat spacetime. This mode is needed for consistent description of decay processes. When gravity is…
We derive an effective gravitational potential, induced by the quantum wavefunction of a physical vacuum of a self-gravitating configuration, while the vacuum itself is viewed as the superfluid described by the logarithmic quantum wave…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
In this paper, we numerically study the impact heavy field degrees of freedom have on vacuum metastability in a toy model, with the aim of better understanding how the decoupling theorem extends to semiclassical processes. We observe that…
We investigate topology-changing processes in 4-dimensional quantum gravity with a negative cosmological constant. By playing the ``gluing-polytope game" in hyperbolic geometry, we explicitly construct an instanton-like solution without…
The bubble expansion velocity is an important parameter in the prediction of gravitational waves from first order phase transitions. This parameter is difficult to compute, especially in phase transitions in strongly coupled theories. In…
The decay rate of a metastable vacuum is usually calculated using a semiclassical approximation to the Euclidean path integral. The extension to a complete Euclidean lattice Monte Carlo computation, however, is hampered by analytic…
We define a (semi-classical) path integral for gravity with Neumann boundary conditions in $D$ dimensions, and show how to relate this new partition function to the usual picture of Euclidean quantum gravity. We also write down the action…
We will apply the quantum inequality type restrictions to Alcubierre's warp drive metric on a scale in which a local region of spacetime can be considered ``flat''. These are inequalities that restrict the magnitude and extent of the…
In the absence of gravity, one can prove that tunnelling instantons exhibit exactly one negative mode in their spectrum of fluctuations. It is precisely the existence of this tunnelling negative mode that warrants an interpretation of these…
A recent analytic test of the instanton method performed by comparing the exact spectrum of the Lam${\acute e}$ potential (derived from representations of a finite dimensional matrix expressed in terms of $su(2)$ generators) with the…
Physical properties of the quantum gravitational vacuum state are explored by solving a lattice version of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. The constraint of diffeomorphism invariance is strong enough to uniquely determine the structure of the…
We study gravitational-wave production from bubble dynamics (bubble collisions and sound waves) during a cosmic first-order phase transition with an analytic approach. We first propose modeling the system with the thin-wall approximation…
We present a new way to compute and interpret quantum tunneling in a 1-D double-well potential. For large transition time we show that the quantum action functional gives an analytical expression for tunneling amplitudes. This has been…
The probable trajectory of the ground state wave function of the universe arises through a quantum tunneling by gravitational instantons. We calculate the quantum tunneling rate for a $n>2$ dimensional closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker…
In this paper, we study Einstein gravity with a minimally coupled scalar field accompanied with a potential, assuming an O(4) symmetric metric ansatz. We call an Euclidean instanton is to be an oscillating instanton, if there exists a point…
A method to determine the quantum state of a scalar field after $O(4)$-symmetric bubble nucleation has been developed recently. The method has an advantage that it concisely gives us a clear picture of the resultant quantum state. In…
We present a semiclassical analysis of the quantum propagator of a particle confined on one side by a steeply, monotonically rising potential. The models studied in detail have potentials proportional to $x^{\alpha}$ for $x>0$; the limit…
We study the decay rate of a false vacuum in gauge theory at the one-loop level. We pay particular attention to the case where the bounce consists of an arbitrary number of scalar fields. With a multi-field bounce, which has a curved…