Related papers: Tools for Tunneling
The standard bounce formalism for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum cannot be applied to theories in which the symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections, because in such theories the tree-level action has no bounce…
We investigate the formation via tunneling of inflating (false-vacuum) bubbles in a true-vacuum background, and the reverse process. Using effective potentials from the junction condition formalism, all true- and false-vacuum bubble…
We present a study of the decay of metastable states of a scalar field via thermal activation, in the presence of a finite density of fermions. The process we consider is the nucleation of ``{\it droplets}'' of true vacuum inside the false…
A model that gives rise to vacuum bubbles is considered where the domain wall field interacts with another real scalar field, resulting in the formation of domain ribbons within the host domain wall. Ribbon-antiribbon annihilations produce…
We discuss models in which vacua other than our own can be directly observed in the present universe. Models with density-dependent vacuum structure can give rise to `non-lethal'-vacua: vacua with lower energy-density than our vacuum, but…
Motivated by recent time domain experiments on ultrafast atom ionization, we analyze the transients and timescales that characterize, besides the relatively long lifetime, the decay by tunneling of a localized state. While the tunneling…
If the effective cosmological constant is non-zero, our observable universe may enter a stage of exponential expansion. In such case, regions of it may tunnel back to the false vacuum of an inflaton scalar field, and inflation with a high…
As originally described by Rubakov, particles are produced during the tunneling of a metastable quantum field. We propose to extend his formalism to compute the backreaction of these particles on the semiclassical decay probability of the…
The spectrum of created particles during the tunneling process, leading to the decay of a false vacuum state, is studied numerically in the thick-wall approximation. It is shown that in this case the particle production is very intensive…
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 discuss the possibility that the vacuum is dynamically determined in the history of the universe. The point is that some of the bubbles with a certain vacuum shrink by the evolution of the universe via gravity and may become black holes.…
The catastrophic decay of a spacetime with compact dimensions, via bubbles of nothing (BoNs), is probably a generic phenomenon. BoNs admit a 4-dimensional description as singular Coleman-de Luccia bounces of the size modulus field,…
This is the first in a series of papers where we study the dynamics of a bubble wall beyond usual approximations, such as the assumptions of spherical bubbles and infinitely thin walls. In this paper, we consider a vacuum phase transition.…
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…
We study the question whether a possible metastable vacuum state is actually populated in a phase transition in the early universe, as is usually assumed in the discussion of vacuum stability bounds e.g. for Standard Model parameters. A…
We compute tunneling in a quantum field theory in 1+1 dimensions for a field potential $U(\Phi)$ of the asymmetric double well type. The system is localized initially in the ``false vacuum''. We consider the case of a {\em compact space}…
We examine the particle production during tunneling in quantum cosmology. We consider a minisuperspace model with a massive, conformally coupled scalar field and a uniform radiation background. In this model, we construct a semiclassical…
A recent analysis of the false-vacuum decay in non-perturbative regimes is here extended in the presence of Einstein gravity, computing the corresponding effective potential and decay rate. We consider a $\lambda \phi^4$ scalar field theory…
Quasiclassical methods for non-adiabatic quantum dynamics can reveal new features of quantum effects, such as tunneling evolution, that are harder to reveal in standard treatments based on wave functions of stationary states. Here, these…
We analyze properties of unstable vacuum states from the point of view of the quantum theory. In the literature one can find some suggestions that some of false (unstable) vacuum states may survive up to times when their survival…