Related papers: Tools for Tunneling
There is a single negative mode in the spectrum of small perturbations about the tunneling solutions describing a metastable vacuum decay in flat spacetime. This mode is needed for consistent description of decay processes. When gravity is…
The Coleman formula for vacuum decay and bubble nucleation has been used to estimate the tunneling rate in models of axion monodromy in recent literature. However, several of Coleman's original assumptions do not hold for such models. Here…
The theoretical treatment of alpha decay by Gamow is revisited by investigating the quantum time scales in tunneling. The time spent by an alpha particle in front of the barrier and traversing it before escape is evaluated using microscopic…
We design and implement a quantum laboratory to experimentally observe and study dynamical processes of quantum field theories. Our approach encodes the field theory as an Ising model, which is then solved by a quantum annealer. As a…
We allow a scalar field on a flat FLRW background metric to tunnel between two degenerate vacua. The resulting true vacuum state then violates the Null Energy Condition, and the corresponding homogeneous fluid induces a bounce, after which…
The periodic bounce configurations responsible for quantum tunneling are obtained explicitly and are extended to the finite energy case for minisuperspace models of the Universe. As a common feature of the tunneling models at finite energy…
We propose a new class of inflationary solutions to the standard cosmological problems (horizon, flatness, monopole,...), based on a modification of old inflation. These models do not require a potential which satisfies the normal…
We consider the model of a false vacuum bubble with a thin wall where the surface energy density is composed of two different components, "domain-wall" type and "dust" type, with opposite signs. We find stably oscillating solutions, which…
Bubbles of nothing (BoNs) describe the decay of spacetimes with compact dimensions and are thus of fundamental importance for many higher dimensional theories proposed beyond the Standard Model. BoNs admit a 4-dimensional description in…
We compute the probability distribution for bubble collisions in an inflating false vacuum which decays by bubble nucleation. Our analysis generalizes previous work of Guth, Garriga, and Vilenkin to the case of general cosmological…
In this paper, we present a series of supersymmetric models exhibiting an entirely new vacuum structure: towers of metastable vacua with higher and higher energies. As the number of vacua grows towards infinity, the energy of the highest…
We consider a single real scalar field in flat spacetime with a polynomial potential up to $\phi^4$, that has a local minimum, the false vacuum, and a deeper global minimum, the true vacuum. When the vacua are almost degenerate we are in…
An alternative approach to the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable phases, is presented. The new method circumvents the use of bounces in Euclidean space by introducing an…
False vacuum decay is a potential mechanism governing the evolution of the early Universe, with profound connections to non-equilibrium quantum physics, including quenched dynamics, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, and dynamical metastability.…
The relative probability to decay towards different vacua during inflation is studied. The calculation is performed in single-field slow-roll potentials using the stochastic inflation formalism. Various situations are investigated,…
We analyze spin dynamics in the tunneling decay of a metastable localized state in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. We find that the spin polarization at short time scales is affected by the initial state while at long time scales both…
In the two Higgs doublet model, there is the possibility that the vacuum where the universe resides in is metastable. We present the tree-level bounds on the scalar potential parameters which have to be obeyed to prevent that situation.…
In order to study the validity of analytical formulas used in the calculation of characteristic physical quantities related to vacuum bubbles, we conduct several numerical simulations of bubble kinematics in the context of cosmological…
The semiclassical formalism for numerical calculation of the rate of tunneling transitions induced by N particles with total energy E of order or higher than the height of the barrier is developed. The formalism is applied to the induced…
In light of the recent swampland conjectures, we explore quantum cosmology and eternal inflation beyond the slow roll regime. We consider a model of a closed universe with a scalar field $\phi$ in the framework of tunneling approach to…