Related papers: False Vacuum Decay With Gravity in Non-Thin-Wall L…
An alternative approach to the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable phases, is presented. The new method circumvents the use of bounces in Euclidean space by introducing an…
We describe a new family of thin-wall instantons, with negative tension bubble walls, that mediate tunneling between Minkowski or de Sitter vacua. Some of these instantons can have exponentially enhanced tunneling rates, and would dominate…
We study the dynamics of a spherically symmetric false vacuum bubble embedded in a true vacuum region separated by a "thick wall", which is generated by a scalar field in a quartic potential. We study the "Farhi-Guth-Guven" (FGG) quantum…
The vacuum decay in a de Sitter universe is studied within semiclassical approximation for the class of effective inflaton potentials whose curvature at the top is close to a critical value. By comparing the actions of the Hawking - Moss…
In Vilenkin's tunneling wavefunction proposal our expanding universe is born via a tunneling through a barrier from nothing at the zero scale factor. We explore the viability of this proposal for the spatially closed FLRW model with a…
We review some recent results concerning the Hartle--Hawking wavefunction of the universe. We focus on pure Einstein theory of gravity in the presence of a positive cosmological constant. We carefully implement the gauge-fixing procedure…
We present a simple and intuitive description of both, the Schwinger effect and false vacuum decay through bubble nucleation, as tunneling problems in one-dimensional relativistic quantum mechanics. Both problems can be described by an…
The formulation of two-dimensional quantum gravity at finite cutoff remains an open problem. We revisit this question in JT gravity from two perspectives: the closed-channel bulk path integral and the path integral over boundary curves.…
The decay rates of quasistable states in quantum field theories are usually calculated using instanton methods. Standard derivations of these methods rely in a crucial way upon deformations and analytic continuations of the physical…
Quantum tunneling from a thin wire or a thin film through a static potential barrier in a zero magnetic field is studied. The wire or the film should satisfy a condition of transverse quantization of levels and be inhomogeneous. Depending…
We provide a semiclassical theory of tunneling decay in a magnetic field and a three-dimensional potential of a general form. Because of broken time-reversal symmetry, the standard WKB technique has to be modified. The decay rate is found…
The tunneling hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wave functions. Here we apply a generalization of a way we formed appropriate wave…
A recent analysis of the false-vacuum decay in non-perturbative regimes is here extended in the presence of Einstein gravity, computing the corresponding effective potential and decay rate. We consider a $\lambda \phi^4$ scalar field theory…
We use some exact results in the scalar field theory to revise the analysis by Coleman and Callan about the false vacuum decay and propose a simple non-perturbative formalism. We introduce exact Green's function which incorporates…
The false vacuum decay has been a central theme in physics for half a century with applications to cosmology and to the theory of fundamental interactions. This fascinating phenomenon is even more intriguing when combined with the…
We study the path-integral formalism in the imaginary-time to show its validity in a case with a metastable ground state. The well-known method based on the bounce solution leads to the imaginary part of the energy even for a state that is…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
I provide some simple physical arguments that, once gravitation and some subtleties are taken into account, rather broad classes of potentials result in instantons which tunnel relatively rapidly between perturbatively stable minima. In…
When the semi-positive cosmological constant is dynamical, the naive Euclidean Einstein action is unbounded from below and the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe is not normalizable. With the inclusion of back-reaction (a crucial…
A standard approach to analyzing tunneling processes in various physical contexts is to use instanton or imaginary time path techniques. For systems in which the tunneling takes place in a time dependent setting, the standard methods are…