Related papers: Vacuum decay and internal symmetries
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…
We study the effects of Goldstone modes on the stability of the vacuum in a $U(1)$ theory for a complex scalar field. The dynamics of the field resemble those of Keplerian motion in the presence of time-dependent friction, whose equations…
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 nucleation and evolution of bubbles are investigated in the model of an $O(3)$-symmetric scalar field coupled to gravity in the high temperature limit. It is shown that, in addition to the well-known bubble of which the inside region is…
We investigate the recent suggestion that a Minkowski vacuum is either absolutely stable, or it has a divergent decay rate and thus fails to have a locally Minkowski description. The divergence comes from boost integration over momenta of…
We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub…
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…
We provide a novel, concise and self-contained evaluation of true- and false vacuum decay rates in general relativity. We insist on general covariance and choose observable boundary conditions, which yields the well known false-vacuum decay…
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
Kinematical and dynamical mechanisms leading to the spontaneous breaking of space-time symmetries are described. The symmetries affected are space and time translations, space rotations, scale and conformal transformations. Applications are…
Motivated by the discovery of a plenitude of metastable vacua in a string landscape and the possibility of rapid tunneling between these vacua, we revisit the dynamics of a false vacuum bubble in a background de Sitter spacetime. We find…
We consider the decay of "false kinks," that is, kinks formed in a scalar field theory with a pair of degenerate symmetry-breaking false vacua in 1+1 dimensions. The true vacuum is symmetric. A second scalar field and a peculiar potential…
In this article, we study Coleman bounce in weakly nonlocal theories which are motivated from string field theory. The kinetic term is extended via an infinite series of high-order derivatives, which comes into play at an energy scale $M$,…
We evaluate both the vacuum decay rate at zero temperature and the finite temperature nucleation rate for the $(\lambda\phi^4/4! + \sigma\phi^6/6!)_{3D}$ model. Using the thin-wall approximation, we obtain the bounce solution for the model…
A method to determine the quantum state of a scalar field after $O(4)$-symmetric bubble nucleation has been developed recently. The method has an advantage that it concisely gives us a clear picture of the resultant quantum state. In…
We study radiative corrections to the decay rate of false vacua, paying particular attention to the renormalization-scale dependence of the decay rate. The decay rate exponentially depends on the bounce action. The bounce action itself is…
We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…
We show that gravitational interactions between massless thermal modes and a nucleating Coleman-de Luccia bubble may lead to efficient decoherence and strongly suppress metastable vacuum decay for bubbles that are small compared to the…
We present a simple and intuitive description of both, the Schwinger effect and false vacuum decay through bubble nucleation, as tunneling problems in one-dimensional relativistic quantum mechanics. Both problems can be described by an…