Related papers: The self-consistent bounce: an improved nucleation…
We compute bounce solutions describing false vacuum decay in a Phi**4 model in two dimensions in the Hartree approximation, thus going beyond the usual one-loop corrections to the decay rate. We use zero energy mode functions of the…
In the standard procedure for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum the solution of the classical Euclidean equation of motion of the background field is needed. On the other hand radiative corrections have to be taken into…
We calculate bubble-nucleation rates for (2+1)-dimensional scalar theories at high temperature. Our approach is based on the notion of a real coarse-grained potential. The region of applicability of our method is determined through internal…
We compute bounce solutions describing false vacuum decay in a Phi**4 model in four dimensions with quantum back-reaction. The back-reaction of the quantum fluctuations on the bounce profiles is computed in the one-loop and Hartree…
We calculate the bubble nucleation rate in a fourth-order gravity theory whose action contains an $R^2$ term, under the thin-wall approximation, by two different methods. First the bounce solution is found for the Euclidean version of the…
We summarize recent work on the consistent calculation of bubble-nucleation rates. Our approach is based on the notion of a real coarse-grained potential. The bubble-nucleation rate is calculated through an expansion around the…
The standard bounce formalism for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum cannot be applied to theories in which the symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections, because in such theories the tree-level action has no bounce…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
We present a consistent calculation of bubble-nucleation rates in theories of two scalar fields. Our approach is based on the notion of a coarse-grained free energy that incorporates the effects of fluctuations with momenta above a given…
In many systems in condensed matter physics and quantum field theory, first order phase transitions are initiated by the nucleation of bubbles of the stable phase. In homogeneous nucleation theory the nucleation rate $\Gamma$ can be written…
We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false-vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations…
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…
The periodic bounce configurations responsible for quantum tunneling are obtained explicitly and are extended to the finite energy case for minisuperspace models of the Universe. As a common feature of the tunneling models at finite energy…
A gauge-invariant framework for computing bubble nucleation rates at finite temperature in the presence of radiative barriers was presented and advocated for model-building and phenomenological studies in an accompanying article…
A simple model, in which nuclei are represented as homogeneous spheres of symmetric nuclear matter, is used to study the effects of a self-consistent pairing interaction on the nuclear response. Effects due to the finite size of nuclei are…
We study zero-temperature quantum fluctuations in harmonically trapped one-dimensional interacting Bose gases, using the self-consistent multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method. We define $phase$ $fluctuations$ from the full…
Classical-statistical lattice simulations provide a useful approximation to out-of-equilibrium quantum field theory, but only for systems exhibiting large occupation numbers, and only for phenomena that are not intrinsically quantum…
In field theories where a metastable false vacuum state arises as a result of radiative corrections, the calculation of the rate of false vacuum decay by bubble nucleation depends on the effective potential and the other functions that…
This paper investigates the importance of radiative corrections for first-order phase transitions, with particular focus on the bubble-nucleation rate. All calculations are done with a strict power-counting, and observables are consistently…
Using the 2PI effective action formalism, we study false vacuum decay beyond the quadratic approximation of the path integral. We derive a coupled system of equations for the bounce and the propagator, and we compute a semi-analytic…