Evidence for renormalized instantons in real-time simulations of vacuum decay

arXiv:2607.06680 · hep-th, astro-ph.CO, gr-qc · Submitted 2026-07-07 · Read on arXiv

Emilie Hertig, Alexander C. Jenkins, Hiranya V. Peiris, Andrew Pontzen, Matthew C. Johnson

hep-th, astro-ph.CO, gr-qc

Submitted: 2026-07-07

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, prepared for submission to Physical Review Letters

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Phase Transitions — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Clustering — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Metastability — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes

Sources

• Eternal Inflation, past and future
• Investigating the near-criticality of the Higgs boson
• Cosmological Aspects of Higgs Vacuum Metastability
• Fate of the false vacuum: towards realization with ultra-cold atoms
• Towards the cold atom analog false vacuum
• Simulating cosmological supercooling with a cold atom system
• Generalized cold-atom simulators for vacuum decay
• The Simons Observatory: Science goals and forecasts
• Forecasting constraints from the cosmic microwave background on eternal inflation
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. II: Gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions
• Bubble Clustering in Cosmological First Order Phase Transitions
• A New Semiclassical Picture of Vacuum Decay
• Bubble velocities and oscillon precursors in first-order phase transitions
• Thermal False Vacuum Decay Is More Than It Seems
• Thermal false vacuum decay in (1+1)-dimensions: Evidence for non-equilibrium dynamics
• Quantitative Analysis of the Stochastic Approach to Quantum Tunneling
• Bubble nucleation and quantum initial conditions in classical statistical simulations
• Mass Renormalization in Lattice Simulations of False Vacuum Decay
• Analog vacuum decay from vacuum initial conditions
• BubbleDet: A Python package to compute functional determinants for bubble nucleation

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