Related papers: Beyond the thin-wall approximation : precise numer…
In recent years, instanton calculus has successfully been employed to estimate tail probabilities of rare events in various stochastic dynamical systems. Without further corrections, however, these estimates can only capture the exponential…
Ultracold atomic gases can undergo phase transitions that mimic relativistic vacuum decay, allowing us to empirically test early-Universe physics in tabletop experiments. We investigate the physics of these analog systems, going beyond…
We investigate false vacuum decay of a relativistic scalar field initialized in the metastable minimum of an asymmetric double-well potential. The transition to the true ground state is a well-defined initial-value problem in real time,…
The standard vacuum bounce formalism suffers from inconsistencies when applied to thermal bubble nucleation, for which ad hoc workarounds are commonly adopted. Identifying the length scales on which nucleation takes place, we demonstrate…
We present SimpleBounce, a C++ package for finding the bounce solution for the false vacuum decay. This package is based on a flow equation which is proposed by the author and solves Coleman-Glaser-Martin's reduced problem: the minimization…
We present a canonical formalism for computing quantum fluctuations of certain discrete degrees of freedom in systems governed by integrable partial differential equations with known Hamiltonian structure, provided these models are…
We revisit the famous Coleman-de Luccia formalism for decay of false vacuum in gravitational theory. Since the corresponding wave function is time-independent we argue that its instanton's interpretation as the decay rate probability is…
The unconstrained reduced action corresponding to the dynamics of scalar fluctuations about the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) background is derived using Dirac's method of description of singular Lagrangian systems. The results are…
We develop semiclassical methods for studying bubble nucleation in models with parameters that vary slowly in time. Introducing a more general rotation of the time contour allows access to a larger set of final states, and typically a…
The quantum decay of a metastable vacuum is exponentially suppressed by a tunneling action that can be calculated in the semi-classical approximation as the Euclidean action of a bounce that interpolates between the false and true phases.…
We calculate the bubble nucleation rate in a fourth-order gravity theory whose action contains an $R^2$ term, under the thin-wall approximation, by two different methods. First the bounce solution is found for the Euclidean version of the…
We generalize the standard computation of homogeneous nucleation theory at zero temperature to a scenario in which the bubble shape is determined self-consistently with its quantum fluctuations. Studying two scalar models in 1+1 dimensions,…
Semiclassical techniques have proven to be a very powerful method to extract physical effects from different quantum theories. Therefore, it is expected that in the near future they will play a very prominent role in the context of quantum…
I have calculated the exponential suppression factor in the decay rate of the false vacuum (per unit volume) for a real scalar field at finite temperature, in the presence of gravity, in the thin-wall approximation. Temperatures are assumed…
The regularized vacuum fluctuation related to a conformally coupled massless scalar field defined on a space-time with dynamical horizon is computed with respect a radially moving observer in a generic flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker…
We introduce a new picture of vacuum decay which, in contrast to existing semiclassical techniques, provides a real-time description and does not rely on classically-forbidden tunneling paths. Using lattice simulations, we observe vacuum…
We study zero-temperature false vacuum decay in $D$ compact spatial dimensions and show that for volumes below a critical value a new bounce solution, different from Coleman's celebrated $O(D)$ bubble, mediates the decay process, and…
The tunneling potential method to calculate the action for vacuum decay is an alternative to the Euclidean bounce method that has a number of attractive features. In this paper we extend the formalism to general spacetime dimension $d>2$…
We propose a simple non-perturbative formalism for false vacuum decay using functional methods. We introduce the quasi-stationary effective action, a bounce action that non-perturbatively incorporates radiative corrections and is robust to…
Scalar field theory with an asymmetric potential is studied at zero temperature and high-temperature for phi^4 theory with both phi and phi^3 symmetry breaking. The equations of motion are solved numerically to obtain O(4) symmetric and…