Related papers: False vacuum decay by self-consistent bounces in f…
The ground state of Bose-Einstein condensates with attractive particle interaction is metastable. One of the decay mechanisms of the condensate is a collapse by macroscopic quantum tunneling, which can be described by the bounce trajectory…
We study a contracting universe composed of cold dark matter and radiation, and with a positive cosmological constant. As is well known from standard cosmological perturbation theory, under the assumption of initial quantum vacuum…
The presence of cosmological fluctuations influences the background cosmology in which the perturbations evolve. This back-reaction arises as a second order effect in the cosmological perturbation expansion. The effect is cumulative in the…
We study the evolution of cosmological perturbations in a non-singular bouncing cosmology with a bounce phase which has superimposed oscillations of the scale factor. We identify length scales for which the final spectrum of fluctuations…
We consider new instantons that appear as a result of accounting for quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations naturally regularize the O(4) singular solutions abandoned in Coleman's theory. In the previous works [3,4] we showed how new…
Positive vacuum energy together with extra dimensions of space imply that our four-dimensional Universe is unstable, generically to decompactification of the extra dimensions. Either quantum tunneling or thermal fluctuations carry one past…
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…
The contribution from quantum vacuum fluctuations of a real massless scalar field to the motion of a test particle that interacts with the field in the presence of a perfectly reflecting flat boundary is here investigated. There is no…
The presence of cosmological perturbations affects the background metric and matter configuration in which the perturbations propagate. This effect, studied a long time ago for gravitational waves, also is operational for scalar…
We re-examine the classic problem of the renormalization of zero-point quantum fluctuations in a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background. We discuss a number of issues that arise when regularizing the theory with a momentum-space cutoff, and…
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…
From previous work arXiv:2010.09811, the semiclassical backreaction equation in 1+1 dimensions was solved and a criterion was implemented to assess the validity of the semiclassical approximation in this case. The criterion involves the…
Non-perturbative quantum geometric effects in Loop Quantum Cosmology predict a $\rho^2$ modification to the Friedmann equation at high energies. The quadratic term is negative definite and can lead to generic bounces when the matter energy…
Several examples are known where quantum gravity effects resolve the classical big bang singularity by a bounce. The most detailed analysis has probably occurred for loop quantum cosmology of isotropic models sourced by a free, massless…
We discuss the effects of a (possibly) negative $(1+z)^6$ type contribution to the Friedmann equation. No definite answer can be given as to the presence and magnitude of a particular mechanism, because any test using the general relation…
We present a regularized and renormalized version of the one-loop nonlinear relaxation equations that determine the non-equilibrium time evolution of a classical (constant) field coupled to its quantum fluctuations. We obtain a…
We present a gauge-invariant treatment of singularity resolution using loop quantum gravity techniques with respect to local SU(2) transformations. Our analysis reveals many novel features of quantum geometry which were till now hidden in…
We point out that the standard formulation of the cosmological constant problem itself is problematic since it is trying to apply the very large scale homogeneous cosmological model to very small (Planck) scale phenomenon. At small scales,…
With the Higgs mass now measured at the sub-percent level, the potential metastability of the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model (SM) motivates renewed study of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this note, we describe an…
The decay rate of a false vacuum is studied in gauge theory, paying particular attention to its gauge invariance. Although the decay rate should not depend on the gauge parameter $\xi$ according to the Nielsen identity, the gauge invariance…