Instability of bubble expansion at zero temperature

Abstract

In the context of false vacuum decay at zero temperature, it is well known that bubbles expand with uniform proper acceleration. We show that this uniformly accelerating expansion suffers from an instability related to the bubble size. This can be observed in Minkowski spacetime as a tachyonic mode in the spectrum of fluctuations for the energy functional in the reference frame in which the uniformly accelerating bubble wall appears static. In such a frame, arbitrary small perturbations cause an amplifying departure from the static wall solution. This implies that the nucleated bubble is not a critical point of the energy functional in the rest frame of nucleation but becomes one in the accelerating frame. The aforementioned instability for vacuum bubbles can be related to the well-known instability for the nucleated critical static bubbles during finite-temperature phase transitions in the rest frame of the plasma. It is therefore proposed that zero-temperature vacuum decays as seen from accelerating frames have a dual description in terms of finite-temperature phase transitions.

14 pages, 7 figures, revtex format; v2: Refs updated, the published version

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Criterion for ultra-fast bubble walls: the impact of hydrodynamic obstruction
• Logarithmically divergent friction on ultrarelativistic bubble walls
• Black holes don't source fast Higgs vacuum decay