No Arabic abstract
We consider a finite-size spherical bubble with a nonequilibrium value of the $q$-field, where the bubble is immersed in an infinite vacuum with the constant equilibrium value $q_{0}$ for the $q$-field (this $q_{0}$ has already cancelled an initial cosmological constant). Numerical results are presented for the time evolution of such a $q$-bubble with gravity turned off and with gravity turned on. For small enough bubbles and a $q$-field energy scale sufficiently below the gravitational energy scale $E_text{Planck}$, the vacuum energy of the $q$-bubble is found to disperse completely. For large enough bubbles and a finite value of $E_text{Planck}$, the vacuum energy of the $q$-bubble disperses only partially and there occurs gravitational collapse near the bubble center.
Metastable states decay at zero temperature through quantum tunneling at an exponentially small rate, which depends on the Coleman-de Luccia instanton, also known as bounce. In some theories, the bounce may not exist or its on-shell action may be ill-defined or infinite, thus hindering the vacuum decay process. In this paper, we test this possibility in modified theories of gravity interacting with a real scalar field. We consider an Einstein-Hilbert term with a non-minimally coupled scalar field and a quadratic Ricci scalar contribution. To tackle the problem we use a new analytic method, with which we prove that the scalar field on the bounce has a universal behavior at large Euclidean radii, almost independently of the potential. Our main result is that the quadratic Ricci scalar prevents the decay, regardless of the other terms in the action. We also comment on the numerical implications of our findings.
We are living in a golden age for experimental cosmology. New experiments with high accuracy precision are been used to constrain proposals of several theories of gravity, as it has been never done before. However, important roles to constrain new theories of gravity in a theoretical perspective are the energy conditions. Throughout this work, we carefully constrained some free parameters of two different families of $f(Q,T)$ gravity using different energy conditions. This theory of gravity combines the gravitation effects through the non-metricity scalar function $Q$, and manifestations from the quantum era of the Universe in the classical theory (due to the presence of the trace of the energy-momentum tensor $T$). Our investigation unveils the viability of $f(Q,T)$ gravity to describe the accelerated expansion our Universe passes through. Besides, one of our models naturally provides a phantom regime for dark energy and satisfies the dominant energy condition. The results here derived strength the viability of $f(Q,T)$ as a promising complete theory of gravity, lighting a new path towards the description of the dark sector of the Universe.
We study a false vacuum decay in a two-dimensional black hole spacetime background. The decay rate in the case that nucleation site locates at a black hole center has been calculated in the literature. We develop a method for calculating the decay rate of the false vacuum for a generic nucleation site. We find that the decay rate becomes larger when the nucleation site is close to the black hole horizon and coincides with that in Minkowski spacetime when the nucleation site goes to infinity.
False vacuum decay in field theory may be formulated as a boundary value problem in Euclidean space. In a previous work, we studied its solution in single scalar field theories with quadratic gravity and used it to find obstructions to vacuum decay. For simplicity, we focused on massless scalar fields and false vacua with a flat geometry. In this paper, we generalize those findings to massive scalar fields with the same gravitational interactions, namely an Einstein-Hilbert term, a quadratic Ricci scalar, and a non-minimal coupling. We find that the scalar field reaches its asymptotic value faster than in the massless case, in principle allowing for a wider range of theories that may accommodate vacuum decay. Nonetheless, this hardly affects the viability of the bounce in the scenarios here considered. We also briefly consider other physically interesting theories by including higher-order kinetic terms and changing the number of spacetime dimensions.
Finding numerical solutions describing bubble nucleation is notoriously difficult in more than one field space dimension. Traditional shooting methods fail because of the extreme non-linearity of field evolution over a macroscopic distance as a function of initial conditions. Minimization methods tend to become either slow or imprecise for larger numbers of fields due to their dependence on the high dimensionality of discretized function spaces. We present a new method for finding solutions which is both very efficient and able to cope with the non-linearities. Our method directly integrates the equations of motion except at a small number of junction points, so we do not need to introduce a discrete domain for our functions. The method, based on multiple shooting, typically finds solutions involving three fields in under a minute, and can find solutions for eight fields in about an hour. We include a numerical package for Mathematica which implements the method described here.