No Arabic abstract
We study domain-walls and bubble nucleation in a non-relativistic vector field theory with different longitudinal and transverse speeds of sound. We describe analytical and numerical methods to calculate the orientation dependent domain-wall tension, $sigma(theta)$. We then use this tension to calculate the critical bubble shape. The longitudinally oriented domain-wall tends to be the heaviest, and sometime suffers an instability. It can spontaneously break into zigzag segments. In this case, the critical bubble develops kinks, and its energy, and therefore the tunneling rate, scales with the sound speeds very differently than what would be expected for a smooth bubble.
We present a study of the role of fermions in the decay of metastable states of a scalar field via bubble nucleation. We analyze both one and three-dimensional systems by using a gradient expansion for the calculation of the fermionic determinant. The results of the one-dimensional case are compared to the exact results of previous work.
Pair production in a constant electric field is closely analogous to bubble nucleation in a false vacuum. The classical trajectories of the pairs are Lorentz invariant, but it appears that this invariance should be broken by the nucleation process. Here, we use a model detector, consisting of other particles interacting with the pairs, to investigate how pair production is seen by different Lorentzian observers. We focus on the idealized situation where a constant external electric field is present for an infinitely long time, and we consider the in-vacuum state for a charged scalar field that describes the nucleating pairs. The in-vacuum is defined in terms of modes which are positive frequency in the remote past. Even though the construction uses a particular reference frame and a gauge where the vector potential is time dependent, we show explicitly that the resulting quantum state is Lorentz invariant. We then introduce a detector particle which interacts with the nucleated pairs, and show that all Lorentzian observers will see the particles and antiparticles nucleating preferentially at rest in the detectors rest frame. Similar conclusions are expected to apply to bubble nucleation in a sufficiently long lived vacuum. We also comment on certain unphysical aspects of the Lorentz invariant in-vacuum, associated with the fact that it contains an infinite density of particles. This can be easily remedied by considering Lorentz breaking initial conditions.
In this work we study vacuum decay and bubble nucleation in models of $f(R)$ higher curvature gravity. Building upon the analysis of Coleman-De Luccia (CDL), we present the formalism to calculate the Euclidean action and the bounce solution for a general $f(R)$ gravity in the thin wall approximation. We calculate the size of the nucleated bubble and the decay exponent for the Starobinsky model and its higher power extensions. We have shown that in the Starobinsky model with a typical potential the nucleated bubble has a larger size in comparison to the CDL bubble and with a lower tunneling rate. However, for higher power extension of the Starobinsky model the size of the bubble and the tunneling exponent can be larger or smaller than the CDL bubble depending on the model parameters. As a counterintuitive example, we have shown that a bubble with a larger size than the CDL bubble but with a higher nucleation rate can be formed in $f(R)$ gravity.
We study the probability for nucleation of quark matter droplets in the dense cold cores of old neutron stars induced by the presence of a self-annihilating dark matter component, $chi$. Using a parameterized form of the equation of state for hadronic and quark phases of ordinary matter, we explore the thermodynamic conditions under which droplet formation is facilitated by the energy injection from $chi$ self-annihilations. We obtain the droplet nucleation time as a function of the dark matter candidate mass, $m_chi$. We discuss further observational consequences.
We consider photonic vortical effect, i.e. the difference of the flows of left- and right-handed photons along the vector of angular velocity in rotating photonic medium. Two alternative frameworks to evaluate the effect are considered, both of which have already been tried in the literature. First, the standard thermal fied theory and, alternatively, Hawking-radiation-type derivation. In our earlier attempt to compare the two approaches, we found a crucial factor of two difference. Here we revisit the problem, paying more attention to details of infrared regularizations. We find out that introduction of an infinitesimal mass of the vector field brings the two ways of evaluating the chiral vortical effect into agreement with each other. Some implications, both on the theoretical and phenomenological sides, are mentioned.