Related papers: Fate of the classical false vacuum

The equilibrium properties of classical self-gravitating systems in the grand canonical ensemble are studied by using the correspondence with an euclidean field theory with infrared and ultraviolet cutoffs. It is shown that the system…

We discuss here phase transitions in quantum field theory in the context of vacuum realignment through an explicit construction. Vacuum destabilisation may occur through a scalar attaining a nonzero expectation value, or through a…

The steady states of the two-species (positive and negative particles) asymmetric exclusion model of Evans, Foster, Godreche and Mukamel are studied using Monte Carlo simulations. We show that mean-field theory does not give the correct…

We study the carrier concentration bistabilities that occur to a highly photo-excited electron gas. The kinetics of this non-equilibrium electron gas is given by a set of nonlinear rate equations. For low temperatures and cw…

The concept of the order parameter is extremely useful in physics. Here, I discuss extensions of this concept to cases when the order parameter is no longer a constant but fluctuates or oscillates in space and time. This allows one to…

In this paper, we study the statistical mechanics within the polymer quantization framework in the semiclassical regime. We apply a non-canonical transformation to the phase space variables. Then, we use this non-canonical transformation to…

When the vacuum state of a scalar or electromagnetic field is modified by the presence of a reflecting boundary, an interacting test particle undergoes velocity fluctuations. Such effect is regarded as a sort of quantum analog of the…

We study dynamical aspects of the plane-wave matrix model at finite temperature. One-loop calculation around general classical vacua is performed using the background field method, and the integration over the gauge field moduli is carried…

Spatial diffusion of particles in periodic potential models has provided a good framework for studying the role of chaos in global properties of classical systems. Here a bidimensional "soft" billiard, classically modeled from an optical…

The process of equilibration in phi^4 theory is investigated for a homogeneous system in 3+1 dimensions and a variety of out-of-equilibrium initial conditions, both in the symmetric and broken phase, by means of the 2PI effective action.…

In an earlier paper I proposed a highly symmetric semi-classical initial condition to describe the universe in the period leading up to the electroweak transition and completely determine all cosmology after that. Nothing beyond the…

A spatially extended classical system with metastable states subject to weak spatiotemporal noise can exhibit a transition in its activation behavior when one or more external parameters are varied. Depending on the potential, the…

We show, without relying on any unproven assumptions, that a low-density free fermion chain exhibits thermalization in the following (restricted) sense. We choose the initial state as a pure state drawn randomly from the Hilbert space in…

Numerical simulations of phase ordering under dissipative dynamics in a (2+1)-dimensional 3-vector model with O(3) symmetry are reported. The energy functional includes terms which stabilize the size of extended topological defects. They…

The quantum Maxwell theory at finite temperature at equilibrium is studied on compact and closed manifolds in both the functional integral- and Hamiltonian formalism. The aim is to shed some light onto the interrelation between the topology…

The functional defined as the squared modulus of the spatial average of the wave function squared, plays the role of an ``order parameter'' for the transition between Hamiltonian ensembles with orthogonal and unitary symmetry. Upon breaking…

First order phase transitions are described in terms of the microcanonical and canonical ensemble, with special attention to finite size effects. Difficulties in interpreting a "caloric curve" are discussed. A robust parameter indicating…

We study the process of vacuum decay in quantum field theory focusing on the stochastic aspects of the interaction between long and short-wavelength modes. This interaction results in a diffusive behavior of the reduced Wigner function…

We consider a class of continuous phase coexistence models in three spatial dimensions. The fluctuations are driven by symmetric stationary random fields with sufficient integrability and mixing conditions, but not necessarily Gaussian. We…

We aim at the construction of dark energy models without exotic matter but with a phantom-like equation of state (an effective phantom phase). The first model we consider is decaying vacuum cosmology where the fluctuations of the vacuum are…