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.
arXiv comment187 pages. PhD thesis, 2013, Columbia University
References in corpus (31)
- Dirichlet-Branes and Ramond-Ramond Charges
- Hierarchies from Fluxes in String Compactifications
- Towards Inflation in String Theory
- Flux Compactification
- The Gravitational Hamiltonian, Action, Entropy, and Surface Terms
- Distributions of flux vacua
- Building a Better Racetrack
- Black Hole Entropy and the Dimensional Continuation of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem
- Thermal derivation of the Coleman-De Luccia tunneling prescription
- Oscillating bounce solutions and vacuum tunneling in de Sitter spacetime
- The Wasteland of Random Supergravities
- Domain walls, near-BPS bubbles, and probabilities in the landscape
- How to Run Through Walls: Dynamics of Bubble and Soliton Collisions
- Quantum Tunneling in Flux Compactifications
- A New Mechanism for Bubble Nucleation: Classical Transitions
- Tumbling through a landscape: Evidence of instabilities in high-dimensional moduli spaces
- Transitions Between de Sitter Minima
- Rapid Tunneling and Percolation in the Landscape
- Decay of de Sitter vacua by thermal activation
- A Wrinkle in Coleman - De Luccia
- Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape
- Field dynamics and tunneling in a flux landscape
- Bounces with O(3) x O(2) symmetry
- Runaway dilatonic domain walls
- Conifolds and Tunneling in the String Landscape
- Transitions Between Flux Vacua
- A Renormalization Group Approach to the Cosmological Constant Problem
- Theory of monolayers with boundaries: Exact results and Perturbative analysis
- The Scales of Brane Nucleation Processes
- Classical Transitions in Superfluid Helium 3
- Bubble Nucleation of Spatial Vector Fields