Related papers: How Effective is the Effective Potential?
We generalize the effective potential to scalar field configurations which are proportional to the Hubble parameter of a homogeneous and isotropic background geometry. This may be useful in situations for which curvature effects are…
We investigate the strongly first-order electroweak phase transition using an effective field theoretical approach. The standard effective field theory with finite number truncation of higher dimensional operators fails in the typical…
The Higgs contribution to the effective potential appears to be complex. How do we interpret this, and how should we modify the calculation to calculate physical quantities such as the critical bubble free energy?
Does the observable spectrum of cosmic fluctuations depend on detailed initial conditions? This addresses the question if the general inflationary paradigm is sufficient to predict within a given model the spectrum and amplitude of cosmic…
The evaluation of effective potentials is critical for a range of phenomenological applications, including inflation, vacuum stability, and phase transitions. A drawback arises from the gauge-dependence of the effective potential.…
We determine the contribution of nontrivial vacuum (topological) excitations, more specifically vortex--strings of the Abelian Higgs model in 3+1 dimensions, to the functional partition function. By expressing the original action in terms…
The problem of defining a gauge invariant effective potential with a strict energetic interpretation is examined in the context of spontaneously broken gauge theories. It is shown that such a potential can be defined in terms of a composite…
Effective potential of a scalar field induced by weak gravity is studied. The set of operators relevant for leading effects and preserving the second order of field equations is found. It is shown that only the mass term and a specific…
Based on chiral soliton models, the quantum fluctuation energies of quarks over a spatially inhomogeneous meson field background have been thoroughly studied. We have used a systematic calculation scheme initiated by Schwinger, in which the…
In recent works, we have shown how $n$-point correlation functions in perturbative QFT can be computed without running into intermediate divergences. Here we want to illustrate explicitly that one can calculate the quantum effective…
Effective field theories have often been applied to systems with deeply inelastic reactions that produce particles with large momenta outside the domain of validity of the effective theory. The effects of the deeply inelastic reactions have…
A method is presented for the computation of the one-loop effective action at finite temperature and density. The method is based on an expansion in the number of spatial covariant derivatives. It applies to general background field…
A detailed derivation of $3+1$ dimensional induced or emergent gravity in the IKKT matrix model at one loop is given, as announced in [1]. The mechanism requires a brane configuration with structure ${\cal M}^{3,1}\times {\cal K} \subset…
Non equilibrium effective field theory is presented as an inhomogeneous field theory, using a formulation which is analogous to that of a gauge theory. This formulation underlines the importance of structural aspects of non-equilibrium,…
We consider phase transitions on (eternal) de Sitter in an O(N) symmetric scalar field theory. Making use of Starobinsky's stochastic inflation we prove that deep infrared scalar modes cannot form a condensate -- and hence they see an…
A theoretical study is reported of electron transport at finite temperature in a double quantum dot (DQD) capacitively coupled to a quantum point contact (QPC). Starting from a Hamiltonian model, a master equation is obtained for the…
We develop a novel framework for describing quantum fluctuations in field theory, with a focus on cosmological applications. Our method uniquely circumvents the use of operator/Hilbert-space formalism, instead relying on a systematic…
Using techniques of effective field theory, we consider the thermodynamical properties of a dilute two-dimensional plasma interacting via a $1/r$ potential. The first one-loop correction to the partition function is already logarithmically…
It is well known that effective potentials can be gauge-dependent while their values at extrema should be gauge-invariant. Unfortunately, establishing this invariance in perturbation theory is not straightforward, since contributions from…
Non-perturbatively generated effective potentials play an extremely useful and often critical role in string and inflationary model building. These potentials are typically computed by methods that assume the system is in equilibrium. For…