Related papers: Tools for Tunneling
We present a simple and intuitive description of both, the Schwinger effect and false vacuum decay through bubble nucleation, as tunneling problems in one-dimensional relativistic quantum mechanics. Both problems can be described by an…
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and…
We consider a multi-field open inflation model, in which one of the fields dominates quantum tunneling from a false vacuum while the other field governs slow-roll inflation within the bubble nucleated from false vacuum decay. We call the…
Using the multi-dimensional wave function formalism, we investigate the quantum state of a scalar field inside a true vacuum bubble nucleated through false vacuum decay in flat spacetime. We developed a formalism which allows us a…
The liquid-vapor transition is a classic example of a discontinuous (first-order) phase transition. Such transitions underlie many phenomena in cosmology, nuclear and particle physics, and condensed-matter physics. They give rise to…
The tunneling hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wave functions. Here we apply a generalization of a way we formed appropriate wave…
A metastable state, or a false vacuum, is not an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian in quantum field theory. Its energy density has a non-zero imaginary part equal to its decay width. Therefore, supersymmetry cannot be exact in the false vacuum.…
We build a model of metastable dark energy, in which the observed vacuum energy is the value of the scalar potential at the false vacuum. The scalar potential is given by a sum of even self-interactions up to order six. The deviation from…
We numerically study the evolution of a classical real scalar field in ${(1+1)}$ dimensions with initial conditions describing thermal fluctuations around a metastable vacuum. We track false vacuum decay in real time and compare several…
Various aspects of time-dependent processes are studied within the large N approximation of O(N) vector models in three dimensions. These include the rolling of fields, the tunneling and decay of vacua. We present an exact solution for the…
It is shown that, to the lowest order in $\hbar,$ the particle production related to the tunneling that leads to the false vacuum decay is described by the orthogonal part of fluctuation field with respect to the bounce solution. As a…
We provide a semiclassical theory of tunneling decay in a magnetic field and a three-dimensional potential of a general form. Because of broken time-reversal symmetry, the standard WKB technique has to be modified. The decay rate is found…
In a recently proposed model of ``ghost condensation'', spatially homogeneous states may mix, via tunneling, with inhomogeneous states which are somewhat similar to bubbles in the theory of false vacuum decay, the corresponding bubble…
Based on the general form of the master equation for open quantum systems the tunneling is considered. Using the path integral technique a simple closed form expression for the tunneling rate through a parabolic barrier is obtained. The…
We compute the decay rate of a metastable cosmic string in contact with a thermal bath by finding the instanton solution. The new feature is that this decay rate is found in the context of non thermal scalar fields in contact with a thermal…
Using the complex scaling transformation we calculate the tunneling lifetime of a condensate inside a magnetic/optical trap. We show that by varying the scattering length, the external potential acts like a 'selective membrane' which…
We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false…
Temperature plays a crucial role in metastable phenomena, not only by contributing to determine the state (phase) of a system, but also ruling the decay probability to more stable states. Such a situation is encountered in many different…
Tunneling half lives are obtained in a minimalistic deformation picture of nuclear decays. As widely documented in other deformation models, one finds that the effective mass of the nucleus changes with the deformation parameter. However,…
Motivated by our earlier argument that the apparent large cosmological constant from quantum fluctuations is actually an artifact of not using a full quantum mechanical superposition to determine the ground state in which the universe lives…