Related papers: Vacuum Tunneling by Cosmic Strings
We present exact bounce solutions and amplitudes for tunneling in i) a piecewise linear-quartic potential and ii) a piecewise quartic-quartic potential. We cross check their correctness by comparing with results obtained through the…
Global strings (those which couple to Goldstone modes) may play a role in cosmology. In particular, if the QCD axion exists, axionic strings may control the efficiency of axionic dark matter abundance. The string network dynamics depend on…
Topological defects such as cosmic strings may have been formed at early-universe phase transitions. Direct tests of this idea are impossible, but the mechanism can be elucidated by studying analogous processes in low-temperature…
The tunneling Hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wavefunctions. Here we apply a generalization of the way we formed appropriate wave…
We analyze the consequences of a recent argument justifying the validity of the "geodesic rule" which can be used to determine the density of global topological defects. We derive a formula that provides a rough estimate of the number of…
We study the behaviour of cosmic string networks in contracting universes, and discuss some of their possible consequences. We note that there is a fundamental time asymmetry between defect network evolution for an expanding universe and a…
Over the preceeding twenty years, the role of underlying classical dynamics in quantum mechanical tunneling has received considerable attention. A number of new tunneling phenomena have been uncovered that have been directly linked to the…
The periodic bounce configurations responsible for quantum tunneling are obtained explicitly and are extended to the finite energy case for minisuperspace models of the Universe. As a common feature of the tunneling models at finite energy…
We study a novel class of nonsingular time-symmetric cosmological bounces. In this class of four dimensional models the bounce is induced by a perfect fluid with a negative energy density. Metric perturbations are solved in an analytic way…
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 $d>2$…
Topological defects can arise in symmetry breaking models where the scalar field potential $V(\phi)$ has no minima and is a monotonically decreasing function of $|\phi|$. The properties of such vacuumless defects are quite different from…
We study the false vacuum decay and bubble nucleation in the presence of a cosmic string in dS spacetime. A cosmic string induces a deficit angle in spacetime around itself so the nucleated bubble has the shape of a rugby ball. Working in…
We supplement the Lorentz transformation $L(v)$ with a new ``Tunneling" transformation $T(v)$. Application of this new operation to elementary quantum mechanics offers a novel, intuitive insight into the nature of quantum tunneling; in…
In this article we discuss how one can systematically construct the point particle theories that realize the vanishing one-loop cosmological constant without the bose-fermi cancellation. Our construction is based on the asymmetric (or…
We construct the thermal bounce solution in holographic models that describes first-order phase transitions between the deconfined and confined phases in strongly-coupled gauge theories. This new, periodic Euclidean solution represents…
We confront the problem of giving a fundamental definition to perturbative string theory in spacetimes with totally compact space (taken to be a torus for simplicity, though the nature of the problem is very general) and non-compact time.…
In our previous paper [1,2], we proposed a probabilistic argument to explain the reason why the cosmological constant is very small in $4D$. We can ask a question: if the behavior of tunneling exponent $B$ can be generalized to…
We show that for a string moving in a background consisting of maximally symmetric gravity, dilaton field and second rank antisymmetric tensor field, the $O(d) \otimes O(d)$ transformation on the vacuum solutions gives inequivalent…
A discrete symmetry of the four-dimensional string effective action is employed to derive spatially homogeneous and inhomogeneous string cosmologies from vacuum solutions of general relativity that admit two commuting spacelike Killing…
Tunneling is a fascinating aspect of quantum mechanics that renders the local minima of a potential meta-stable, with important consequences for particle physics, for the early hot stage of the universe, and more speculatively, for the…