Related papers: Bounce in Valley: Study of the extended structures…
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.…
We investigate vacuum decays in the early Universe in the presence of curvature perturbations. For sufficiently large perturbations associated with over-densities, we find that the bounce solution develops an oscillating middle stage near…
We investigate the bounce solutions in vacuum decay problems. We show that it is possible to have a stable false vacuum in a potential that is unbounded from below.
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
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…
We study the path-integral formalism in the imaginary-time to show its validity in a case with a metastable ground state. The well-known method based on the bounce solution leads to the imaginary part of the energy even for a state that is…
Scalar field theory with an asymmetric potential is studied at zero temperature and high-temperature for $\phi^6$ potential. The equations of motion are solved numerically to obtain O(4) spherical symmetric and O(3) cylindrical symmetric…
We investigate the metastability of scalar fields in quantum field theories at finite temperature, focusing on a detailed understanding of the bounce solution. At finite temperature, the bounce solution depends on two variables: the…
The stability of our vacuum is analyzed and several aspects concerning this question are reviewed. 1) In the standard Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model we review the instability towards the formation of a bubble of lower energy density and…
The 'thin-wall approximation' gives a simple estimate of the decay rate of an unstable quantum field. Unfortunately, the approximation is uncontrolled. In this paper I show that there are actually two different thin-wall approximations and…
I show that cosmological bubble walls in the thin wall approximation are unstable to the creation of "barnacles" -- loci of different wall tension adjacent to regions filled with a third vacuum. Barnacle formation leads to the same…
We explore the stability of domain wall and bubble solutions in theories with compact extra dimensions. The energy density stored inside of the wall can destabilize the volume modulus of a compactification, leading to solutions containing…
An Euclidean bounce describing vacuum decay can be considered as an infinite stack of concentric thin shells to which a thin-wall action can be assigned. The integral over all shells produces then a tunneling action that is precisely the…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
We study tunneling in one-dimensional quantum mechanics using the path integral in real time, where solutions of the classical equation of motion live in the complex plane. Analyzing solutions with small (complex) energy, relevant for…
We study the dynamics of a cosmological bubble wall beyond the approximation of an infinitely thin wall. In a previous paper, we discussed the range of validity of this approximation and estimated the first-order corrections due to the…
The coupling between $z$ valleys in the conduction band of a Si quantum well arises from phenomena occurring within several atoms from the interface, thus ruling out a theoretical description based on pure effective mass theory. However,…
This paper examines the classical dynamics of false vacuum regions embedded in surrounding regions of true vacuum, in the thin-wall limit. The dynamics of all generally relativistically allowed solutions -- most but not all of which have…
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…
We consider the decay of vortices trapped in the false vacuum of a theory of scalar electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions. The potential is inspired by models with intermediate symmetry breaking to a metastable vacuum that completely breaks a…