Related papers: Is the vacuum stable?
Vacuum decay posits that the universe's apparent vacuum is metastable and could transition to a lower-energy state. According to current physics models, if such a transition occurred in any location, a region of "true vacuum" would…
In a previous paper [JCAP06, 033 (2018)] we have proved that it is possible to have a stable false vacuum in a potential that is unbounded from below. In this paper we discuss the Physics related to our theoretical and numerical results. We…
We consider a cosmology in which the final stage of the Universe is neither accelerating nor decelerating, but approaches an asymptotic state where the scale factor becomes a constant value. In order to achieve this, we first bring in a…
Within conventional big bang cosmology, it has proven to be very difficult to understand why today's cosmological constant is so small. In this paper, we show that a cyclic model of the universe can naturally incorporate a dynamical…
An accelerated universe should naturally have a vacuum energy density determined by its dynamical curvature. The cosmological constant is most likely a temporary description of a dynamical variable that has been drastically evolving from…
It is suggested that the true ground state of the world has exactly vanishing vacuum energy and that the cosmological constant that seems to have been observed is due to our region of the universe being stuck in a false vacuum, whose energy…
Pathria(1972) has shown, for a pressureless closed Universe, that it is inside a black (or white) hole. We show now, that the Universe with a cosmic pressure obeying Einstein's field equations, can be inside a white-hole. In the closed…
The theory of false vacuum decay in a thermal system may have a cross-over from predominantly thermal transitions to quantum transitions as the temperature is decreased. New numerical methods and results are presented here that can be used…
From the axiom of the unrestricted repeatability of all experiments, Bondi and Gold argued that the universe is in a stable, self-perpetuating equilibrium state. This concept generalizes the usual cosmological principle to the perfect…
The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…
A short review about vacuum energy and the cosmological constant is presented. The observed acceleration of the universe introduces a new meV energy scale. The problem is that, theoretically, the predicted vacuum energy is many orders of…
The cosmological constant, i.e., the energy density stored in the true vacuum state of all existing fields in the Universe, is the simplest and the most natural possibility to describe the current cosmic acceleration. However, despite its…
It will be argued here that the cosmological constant problem exists because of the way the vacuum is defined in quantum field theory. It has been known for some time that for QFT to be gauge invariant certain terms--such as part of the…
The current experimentally measured parameters of the Standard Model (SM) suggest that our Universe lies in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the Higgs field is prone to vacuum decay to a lower state with catastrophic consequences. Our…
In contrast to the phenomenon of nullification of the cosmological constant in the equilibrium vacuum, which is the general property of any quantum vacuum, there are many options in modifying the Einstein equation to allow the cosmological…
In this paper we revisit and update the computation of thermal corrections to the stability of the electroweak vacuum in the Standard Model. At zero temperature, we make use of the full two-loop effective potential, improved by three-loop…
We discuss the cosmological constant puzzle and possible connections to the (meta-)stability of the Higgs vacuum suggested by recent LHC results. A possible explanation involves new critical phenomena in the ultraviolet, close to the Planck…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
Estimates of the Higgs and top quark masses, $m_{H} \simeq 125.10 \pm 0.14$ [GeV] and $m_{t} \simeq 172.76 \pm 0.30$ [GeV] based on the experimental results place the Standard Model in the region of the metastable vacuum. A consequence of…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…