Related papers: Defect Formation Rates in Cosmological First-Order…
The decay of metastable 'false vacuum' states via bubble nucleation plays a crucial role in many cosmological scenarios. Cold-atom analog experiments will soon provide the first empirical probes of this process, with potentially…
When a second-order phase transition is crossed at fine rate, the evolution of the system stops being adiabatic as a result of the critical slowing down in the neighborhood of the critical point. In systems with a topologically nontrivial…
Kibble-Zurek scaling is the scaling of the density of the topological defects formed via the Kibble-Zurek mechanism with respect to the rate at which a system is cooled across a continuous phase transition. Recently, the density of the…
Systems passing through quantum critical points at finite rates have a finite probability of undergoing transitions between different eigenstates of the instantaneous Hamiltonian. This mechanism was proposed by Kibble as the underlying…
Many particle physics models of matter admit solutions corresponding to stable or long-lived topological defects. In the context of standard cosmology it is then unavoidable that such defects will form during phase transitions in the very…
We study the dynamical evolution of a phase interface or bubble in the context of a \lambda \phi^4 + g \phi^6 scalar quantum field theory. We use a self-consistent mean-field approximation derived from a 2PI effective action to construct an…
Of the universe's original gauge symmetries, only $SU(3)_c$ (quantum chromodynamics) and $U(1)_{\rm EM}$ (electromagnetism) remain unbroken today. There is, however, no reason to assume that these symmetries are permanent. This paper…
Enhancing the efficiency of water electrolysis, which can be severely impacted by the nucleation and growth of bubbles, is key in the energy transition. In this combined experimental and numerical study, in-situ bubble evolution and…
The effect of subcritical hadron bubbles on a first-order quark-hadron phase transition is studied. These subcritical hadron bubbles are created due to thermal fluctuations, and can introduce a finite amount of phase mixing (quark phase…
Topological defects are produced during phase transitions in the very early Universe. They arise in most unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions. These lectures focus on the role of topological defects in…
In a vacuum first-order phase transition, gravitational waves are generated from collision of bubbles of the true vacuum. The spectrum from such collisions takes the form of a broken power law. We consider a toy model for such a phase…
We study the dynamics of electroweak bubbles in the scenario of a strong first order inverse electroweak phase transition at the TeV scale involving the global structure of the nonlinear sigma field in the littlest Higgs model with T…
After a review of CMBR correlations and recent observations, a study of possible CMBR observations of the QCD early universe phase transition is discussed. A model for the QCD bubble walls gives the surface tension found in lattice…
Recently the thermal friction on an expanding bubble from the cosmic first-order phase transition has been calculated to all orders of the interactions between the bubble wall and thermal plasma, leading to a $\gamma^2$-scaling instead of…
We review the current issues of nonequilibrium phase transitions, in particular, in the early universe. Phase transitions cannot maintain thermal equilibrium and become nonequilibrium when the thermal relaxation time scale is greater than…
The Standard Model Higgs potential may become unbounded from below at large field values, with important cosmological implications. For a potential of this form, the commonly assumed scenario of a nucleated thin-wall bubble driving the…
First order phase transitions are violent phenomena that occur when the state of the universe evolves abruptly from one vacuum to another. A \emph{direct} phase transition connects a local vacuum to a deeper vacuum of the zero--temperature…
The bubble wall velocity in the first order phase transition plays an important role in determining both the amplitude and the pivot frequency of stochastic gravitational wave background. In the framework of the minimal left-right symmetric…
Accurately determining bubble wall velocities in first-order phase transitions is of great importance for the prediction of gravitational wave signals and the matter-antimatter asymmetry. However, it is a challenging task which typically…
We describe a new mechanism of dark matter production in the early Universe, based on the dynamics of a first order phase transition. We assume that dark matter particles acquire mass during the phase transition, making it energetically…