Related papers: Metastability in Two Dimensions and the Effective …
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…
We study the decay of the metastable symmetric phase in the standard model at finite temperature. For the SU(2)-Higgs model the two wave function correction terms $Z_{\vp}(\vp^2,T)$ and $Z_{\chi}(\vp^2,T)$ of Higgs and Goldstone boson…
We investigate rarely explored details of supercooled cosmological first-order phase transitions at the electroweak scale, which may lead to strong gravitational wave signals or explain the cosmic baryon asymmetry. The nucleation…
For two-dimensional many-particle systems first-order, second-order, single step continuous, as well as two-step continuous (KTHNY-like) melting transitions have been found in previous studies. Recent computer simulations, using particle…
False-vacuum decay between two morphologically distinct supersolid phases via bubble nucleation is studied in a uniform dipolar gas confined to the plane. Starting from a metastable honeycomb state, the formation of stripe phase domains is…
The observed cosmological constant may originate as the minimum value $U_{min}$ of a scalar field potential, where the scalar field is frozen due to a large mass. If this vacuum is metastable, it may decay to a true vacuum either at present…
In the context of false vacuum decay at zero temperature, it is well known that bubbles expand with uniform proper acceleration. We show that this uniformly accelerating expansion suffers from an instability related to the bubble size. This…
We briefly introduce hysteresis in spatially extended systems and the dynamic phase transition observed as the frequency of the oscillating field increases beyond a critical value. Hysteresis and the decay of metastable phases are closely…
We study the decay dynamics of an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of a metastable trapping potential from which the condensate can escape via tunneling through finite barriers. The time-dependent decay process is…
In simulations of the 2D Ising model, we examine heterogeneous nucleation induced by a small impurity consisting of a line of $l$ fixed spins. As $l$ increases, we identify a limit of stability beyond which the metastable phase is not…
We simulate the decay of isolated, spherically symmetric droplets in a cosmological phase transition. It has long been posited that such heated droplets of the metastable state could form, and they have recently been observed in 3D…
Simple classical thermodynamic approach to the general description of metastable states is presented. It makes possible to calculate the explicit dependence of the Gibbs free energy on temperature, to calculate the heat capacity, the…
It has been shown that four dimensional N=2 gauge theories, softly broken to N=1 by a superpotential term, can accommodate metastable non-supersymmetric vacua in their moduli space. We study the SU(2) theory at high temperatures in order to…
Using the holographic correspondence as a tool, we study the dynamics of first-order phase transitions in strongly coupled gauge theories at finite temperature. Considering an evolution from the large to the small temperature phase, we…
The spatial fluctuations of a superfluid flowing in a weak random potential are investigated. We employ classical field theory to demonstrate that the disorder-averaged nonequilibrium second-order correlation of the order parameter at zero…
Granular systems confined in vertically vibrated shallow horizontal boxes (quasi two-dimensional geometry) present a liquid to solid phase transition when the frequency of the periodic forcing is increased. An effective model, where grains…
The finite size theory of metastability in a quartic potential is developed by the semiclassical path integral method. In the quantum regime, the relation between temperature and classical particle energy is found in terms of the first…
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…
This paper extends our earlier studies of free energy functions of density and crystalline order parameters for models of supercooled water, which allows us to examine the possibility of two distinct metastable liquid phases [J. Chem. Phys.…
We apply the effective potential method to study the vacuum stability of the bounded from above $(-\phi^{6})$ (unstable) quantum field potential. The stability ($\partial E/\partial b=0)$ and the mass renormalization ($\partial^{2}…