No Arabic abstract
In the context of quantum field theory (QFT), unstable particles are associated with complex-valued poles of two-body scattering matrices in the unphysical sheet of rapidity space. The Breit-Wigner formula relates this pole to the mass and life-time of the particle, observed in scattering events. In this letter, we uncover new, dynamical signatures of unstable excitations and show that they have a strong effect on the non-equilibrium properties of QFT. Focusing on a 1+1D integrable model, and using the theory of Generalized Hydrodynamics, we study the formation and decay of unstable particles by analysing the release of hot matter into a low-temperature environment. We observe the formation of tails and the decay of the emitted nonlinear waves, in sharp contrast to the situation without unstable excitations. We expect these signatures of instability to have a large degree of universality. Our study shows that the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems can be strongly affected not only by the spectrum, but also by excitations with finite life-times.
Oscillons are long-lived, slowly radiating solutions of nonlinear classical relativistic field theories. Recently it was discovered that in one spatial dimension their decay may proceed in staccato bursts. Here we perform a systematic numerical study to demonstrate that although this behaviour is not confined to one spatial dimension, it quickly becomes unobservable when the dimension of space is increased. To complete the picture we also present explicit results on the dimension dependence of the collapse instability observed for three-dimensional oscillons.
We study one-loop corrections to retarded and symmetric hydrostatic correlation functions within the Schwinger-Keldysh effective field theory framework for relativistic hydrodynamics, focusing on charge diffusion. We first consider the simplified setup with only diffusive charge density fluctuations, and then augment it with momentum fluctuations in a model where the sound modes can be ignored. We show that the loop corrections, which generically induce non-analyticities and long-range effects at finite frequency, non-trivially preserve analyticity of retarded correlation functions in spatial momentum due to the KMS constraint, as a manifestation of thermal screening. For the purposes of this analysis, we develop an interacting field theory for diffusive hydrodynamics, seen as a limit of relativistic hydrodynamics in the absence of temperature and longitudinal velocity fluctuations.
We study the critical $O(3)$ model using the numerical conformal bootstrap. In particular, we use a recently developed cutting-surface algorithm to efficiently map out the allowed space of CFT data from correlators involving the leading $O(3)$ singlet $s$, vector $phi$, and rank-2 symmetric tensor $t$. We determine their scaling dimensions to be $(Delta_{s}, Delta_{phi}, Delta_{t}) = (0.518942(51), 1.59489(59), 1.20954(23))$, and also bound various OPE coefficients. We additionally introduce a new ``tip-finding algorithm to compute an upper bound on the leading rank-4 symmetric tensor $t_4$, which we find to be relevant with $Delta_{t_4} < 2.99056$. The conformal bootstrap thus provides a numerical proof that systems described by the critical $O(3)$ model, such as classical Heisenberg ferromagnets at the Curie transition, are unstable to cubic anisotropy.
We discuss multiplicity fluctuation caused by noises during hydrodynamic evolution of the quark-gluon fluid created in high-energy nuclear collisions.
This paper applies the phase-integral method to the stationary theory of alpha-decay. The rigorous form of the connection formulae, and their one-directional nature that was not widely known in the physical literature, are applied. The condition for obtaining s-wave metastable states affects the stationary state at large distance from the nucleus, which is dominated by the cosine of the phase integral minus (pi over 4). Accurate predictions for the lowest s-wave metastable state and mean life of the radioactive nucleus are obtained in the case of Uranium. The final part of the paper describes the phase-integral algorithm for evaluating stationary states by means of a suitable choice of freely specifiable base function. Within this framework, an original approximate formula for the phase integrand with arbitrary values of the angular momentum quantum number is obtained.