Related papers: Nucleation Rates in Flat and Curved Space
We study the instantons describing the production of particles at the ends of codimension-one objects (strings and struts) in $(2+1)$-dimensional Minkowski and de Sitter spaces. A Minkowskian background allows only for systems with…
We study some gravitational instanton solutions that offer a natural realization of the spontaneous creation of inflationary universes in the brane world context in string theory. Decoherence due to couplings of higher (perturbative) modes…
We study particle creation for scalar fields in conformally flat spacetimes using resummed heat-kernel techniques. We make use of an analogy between quantum scalar fields in conformally flat spacetimes and scalar field theories with a…
Infra-Red scaling property of inflationary universe is in the same universality class of random walk. The two point correlators of the curvature perturbations are enhanced by the e-folding number N. The distribution function of the…
The representation theory of de Sitter space allows for a category of partially massless particles which have no flat space analog, but could have existed during inflation. We study the couplings of these exotic particles to inflationary…
We numerically investigate nucleation processes in the transient dynamics of the two-dimensional complex Ginzburg-Landau equation towards its "frozen" state with quasi-stationary spiral structures. We study the transition kinetics from…
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…
To model a realistic situation for the beginning we consider massive real scalar $\phi^4$ theory in a (1+1)-dimensional asymptotically static Minkowski spacetime with an intermediate stage of expansion. To have an analytic headway we assume…
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…
This paper investigates Starobinsky's model of inflation driven by the trace anomaly of conformally coupled matter fields. This model does not suffer from the problem of contrived initial conditions that occurs in most models of inflation…
We propose a new deformed Rieffel product for functions in de Sitter spacetime, and study the resulting deformation of quantum field theory in de Sitter using warped convolutions. This deformation is obtained by embedding de Sitter in a…
Nucleation of branes by a four-form field has recently been considered in string motivated scenarios for the neutralization of the cosmological constant. An interesting question in this context is whether the nucleation of stacks of…
We consider Schwinger pair production in 1+1 dimensional de Sitter space, filled with a constant electric field $E$. This can be thought of as a model for describing false vacuum decay beyond the semiclassical approximation, where pairs of…
Soft gravitons produced by the expansion of de Sitter can be viewed as the Nambu-Goldstone bosons of spontaneously broken asymptotic symmetries of the de Sitter spacetime. We explicitly construct the associated charges, and show that acting…
For a quantum scalar field that is confined in a uniformly linearly accelerated cavity in Minkowski spacetime and interacts linearly with a scalar field that is not confined in the cavity, a de-excitation probability formula was obtained in…
The four-form field recently considered by Hawking and Turok couples naturally to a charged membrane, across which the effective cosmological constant has a discontinuity. We present instantons for the creation of an open inflationary…
In this paper we study the charged electro-weak interactions in the de Sitter geometry. We develop the reduction formalism for the Proca field with the help of the solutions for the interacting fields. Perturbation theory is used for…
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…
Electric flux may be screened by pair nucleation of heavy charges, a process that has a simple description in terms of a worldline instanton. When flux is wrapped around a small compact spatial dimension, worldline instantons still induce…
In recent papers [1,2], it has been shown that the presence of negative norm states or negative frequency solutions are indispensable for a fully covariant quantization of the minimally coupled scalar field in de Sitter space. Their…