Related papers: SUBCRITICAL BUBBLES NEAR THE PHASE SPACE DOMAIN WA…
Standard calculations of cosmological first-order phase transitions usually assume critical bubbles to nucleate on a homogeneous symmetric vacuum background. However, this assumption can fail in weak transitions, where thermal fluctuations…
We use inelastic hard sphere molecular dynamics simulations and laboratory experiments to study patterns in vertically oscillated granular layers. The simulations and experiments reveal that {\em phase bubbles} spontaneously nucleate in the…
The cosmological remnants of a first-order phase transition generally depend on the perturbations that the walls of expanding bubbles originate in the plasma. Several of the formation mechanisms occur when bubbles collide and lose their…
We study the interaction of particles with a domain wall at a symmetry-breaking phase transition by perturbing about the domain wall solution. We find the particulate excitations appropriate near the domain wall and relate them to the…
The small surface tension of the interface between hadronic and quark-gluon-plasma domains, along with a negative curvature tension, implies that the uniform plasma is unstable against spontaneous formation of hadronic bubbles. We…
We consider the role played by subcritical bubbles during the electroweak phase transition, estimate their average size, amplitude and formation rate taking into account the crucial role played by thermalization. We also study the influence…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. We examine the evolution and collision of slow-moving…
In extensions of the Standard Model with SU(2) singlet scalar fields, there can be regions of parameter space for which the electroweak phase transition is first order already at the mean-field level of analysis. We show that in this case…
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…
We quantize subcritical bubbles which are formed in the weakly first order phase transition. We find that the typical size of the thermal fluctuation reduces in the quantum-statistical physics. We estimate the typical size and the amplitude…
We investigate numerically the critical behaviour which occurs in the collapse of both spherically symmetric and asymmetric scalar field bubbles with full general relativity. We use a minimally coupled scalar field subject to a "double…
We demonstrate a novel mechanism for the formation of topological defects in a first order phase transition for theories in the presence of small explicit symmetry breaking terms. We carry out numerical simulations of collisions of two…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. It has been claimed that this leads to a significant…
Making use of both the stochastic approach to the tunneling phenomenon and the threshold statistics, we offer a simple argument to show that critical bubbles may be correlated in first-order phase transitions and biased compared to the…
We investigate the creation of scalar particles inside a region delimited by a bubble which is expanding with non-zero acceleration. The bubble is modelled as a thin shell and plays the role of a moving boundary, thus influencing the…
We study statistical relationships between bubble walls in cosmological first-order phase transitions. We consider the conditional and joint probabilities for different points on the walls to remain uncollided at given times. We use these…
We investigate bubble dynamics in a holographic superfluid undergoing a first-order phase transition with spontaneous $U(1)$ symmetry breaking. Near the nucleation threshold, the system exhibits universal critical behavior governed by a…
Weak first-order phase transitions proceed with percolation of new phase. The kinematics of this process is clarified from the point of view of subcritical bubbles. We examine the effect of small subcritical bubbles around a large domain of…
We study collisions between pairs of bubbles nucleated in an ambient false vacuum. For the first time, we include the effects of small initial (quantum) fluctuations around the instanton profiles describing the most likely initial bubble…
Some of the peculiar electrodynamical effects associated with gauged ``dimension bubbles'' are presented. Such bubbles, which effectively enclose a region of 5d spacetime, can arise from a 5d theory with a compact extra dimension. Bubbles…