相关论文: Safety of Minkowski Vacuum
We present new solutions of vacuum decay in non-Minkowski spacetimes. On a de Sitter background, the tunneling between vacuum states with a nonvanishing energy difference has been considered, whereas in the special case of degenerate vacua…
A consistency condition of general relativity as an effective field theory in Minkowskian background uniquely fixes the value of the cosmological constant. In two-loop calculations, including the interaction of gravitons with matter fields,…
We present new results on quantum tunneling between deep potential wells, in the presence of a strong constant magnetic field. We construct a family of double well potentials containing examples for which the low-energy eigenvalue splitting…
Minkowski space serves as a framework for the theoretical constructions that deal with manifestations of relativistic effects in physical phenomena. But neither Minkowski himself nor the subsequent developers of the relativity theory have…
I show that a quantized Klein-Gordon field in Minkowski space obeys an `operational' weak energy condition: the energy of an isolated device constructed to measure or trap the energy in a region, plus the energy it measures or traps, cannot…
Tunneling in quantum field theory is well understood in the case of a single scalar field. However, in theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking, one has to take into account the additional zero modes which appear due to the Goldstone…
To cure the lack of predictive power of general relativity Geroch proposed to complete the theory with an additional postulate that only "hole-free" spacetimes are permitted. I argue that this postulate is too strong -- it prohibits even…
In the thin-wall approximation, the decay of a gravitating false vacuum to a lower-energy state is affected by the cosmological horizon structure in both spaces. The nucleation radius of a bubble of true vacuum depends on the surface…
In this paper, we attempt to test whether Euclidean lattice quantum field theory can be analytically continued into Minkowski space via the inverse Wick rotation. Our discussion indicates that such an analytical continuation is impossible…
Quantum particles interacting with potential barriers are ubiquitous in physics, and the question of how much time they spend inside classically forbidden regions has attracted interest for many decades. Recent developments of new…
Under the assumption that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…
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…
The energy in the ghost-free massive gravity theory is calculated via explicitly resolving the initial value constraints for spherically symmetric deformations of flat space. It turns out that the energy is positive in some cases, but in…
We compute tunneling in a quantum field theory in 1+1 dimensions for a field potential $U(\Phi)$ of the asymmetric double well type. The system is localized initially in the ``false vacuum''. We consider the case of a {\em compact space}…
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…
Bubble universes and traversable wormholes in general relativity can be realized as two sides of the same concept. To exemplify, we find, display, and study in a unified manner a Minkowski-Minkowski closed universe and a Minkowski-Minkowski…
Secure positioning, a prover located at a specified position convinces a set of verifiers at distant reference stations that he/she is indeed at the specific position, is considered to be impossible if the prover and verifiers have no…
Negative energy density is unavoidable in the quantum theory of field. We give a revised proof of the existence of negative energy density unambiguously for a massless scalar field.
Quantum tunneling between two potential wells in a magnetic field can be strongly increased when the potential barrier varies in the direction perpendicular to the line connecting the two wells and remains constant along this line. A…