Topics in vacuum decay (Ph.D Thesis)
arXiv:1505.06397
Abstract
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 the new vacuum. The outward pressure of the truer vacuum makes the bubble expand and consequently eat away more of the old phase. In the presence of gravity this phenomenon gets more complicated and meanwhile more interesting. It can potentially have important cosmological consequences. Some aspects of this decay are studied in this thesis. Solutions with different symmetry than the generically used O(4) symmetry are studied and their actions calculated. Vacuum decay in a spatial vector field is studied and novel features like kinky domain walls are presented. The question of stability of vacua in a landscape of potentials is studied and the possible instability in large dimension of fields is shown. Finally a compactification of the Einstein-Maxwell theory is studied which can be a good lab to understand the decay rates in compactification models of arbitrary dimensions.
187 pages. PhD thesis, 2013, Columbia University
References in corpus (14)
- Flux Compactification
- Thermal derivation of the Coleman-De Luccia tunneling prescription
- Domain walls, near-BPS bubbles, and probabilities in the landscape
- Transitions Between de Sitter Minima
- A Wrinkle in Coleman - De Luccia
- Rapid Tunneling and Percolation in the Landscape
- Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape
- Field dynamics and tunneling in a flux landscape
- Bounces with O(3) x O(2) symmetry
- Conifolds and Tunneling in the String Landscape
- Transitions Between Flux Vacua
- A Renormalization Group Approach to the Cosmological Constant Problem
- The Scales of Brane Nucleation Processes
- Bubble Nucleation of Spatial Vector Fields