Related papers: False Vacuum Decay With Gravity in Non-Thin-Wall L…
The probability of destruction of a metastable vacuum state by the field of a highly virtual particle with energy $E$ is calculated for a (3+1) dimensional theory in the leading WKB approximation in the thin-wall limit. It is found that the…
We revisit the formalism for tunneling in quantum field theory developed by Coleman and collaborators. In particular using the generalization of WKB methods for tunneling in quantum mechanics we avoid the problems with negative eigenvalues…
An Euclidean bounce describing vacuum decay can be considered as an infinite stack of concentric thin shells to which a thin-wall action can be assigned. The integral over all shells produces then a tunneling action that is precisely the…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
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.…
We investigate the formation via tunneling of inflating (false-vacuum) bubbles in a true-vacuum background, and the reverse process. Using effective potentials from the junction condition formalism, all true- and false-vacuum bubble…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
Recently, the Lorentzian path integral formulation using the Picard-Lefschetz theory has attracted much attention in quantum cosmology. In this paper, we analyze the tunneling amplitude in quantum mechanics by using the Lorentzian…
The wave function of the universe is evaluated by using the Euclidean path integral approach. As is well known, the real Euclidean path integral diverges because the Einstein-Hilbert action is not positive definite. In order to obtain a…
We apply the Lorentzian path integral to the decay of a false vacuum and estimate the false-vacuum decay rate. To make the Lorentzian path integral convergent, the deformation of an integral contour is performed by following the…
Quantum cosmology uses a wave function to model the universe, but finding solutions for this poses a problem as it is difficult to define the boundary conditions or identify the correct path for a path integral. We begin the discussion by…
We present a general numerical method for computing precisely the false vacuum decay rate, including the prefactor due to quantum fluctuations about the classical bounce solution, in a self-interacting scalar field theory modeling the…
This is the first in a series of papers where we study the dynamics of a bubble wall beyond usual approximations, such as the assumptions of spherical bubbles and infinitely thin walls. In this paper, we consider a vacuum phase transition.…
The tunneling wave function of the universe is investigated in a minisuperspace framework of a de Sitter universe with a quantum scalar field, treated as a perturbation. We consider three different approaches to defining the tunneling wave…
We present a fully analytical calculation of the false vacuum decay rate for a self-interacting scalar field in the thin-wall approximation. We obtain the bounce solution, together with the Euclidean action, counter-terms and…
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…
The 'thin-wall approximation' gives a simple estimate of the decay rate of an unstable quantum field. Unfortunately, the approximation is uncontrolled. In this paper I show that there are actually two different thin-wall approximations and…
We study tunneling in one-dimensional quantum mechanics using the path integral in real time, where solutions of the classical equation of motion live in the complex plane. Analyzing solutions with small (complex) energy, relevant for…
It was recently shown that tunneling wavefunction proposal is consistent with loop quantum geometry corrections including both holonomy and inverse scale factor corrections in the gravitational part of a spatially closed isotropic model…
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…