Kavli Affiliate: Frank Wilczek
| First 5 Authors: Gianluca Lagnese, Federica Maria Surace, Sid Morampudi, Frank Wilczek,
| Summary:
Distinguishing whether a system supports alternate low-energy (locally
stable) states — stable (true vacuum) versus metastable (false vacuum) — by
direct observation can be difficult when the lifetime of the state is very long
but otherwise unknown. Here we demonstrate, in a tractable model system, that
there are physical phenomena on much shorter time scales that can diagnose the
difference. Specifically, we study the time evolution of the magnetization
following a quench in the tilted quantum Ising model, and show that its
magnitude spectrum is an effective diagnostic. Small transition bubbles are
more common than large ones, and we see characteristic differences in the size
dependence of bubble lifetimes even well below the critical size for false
vacuum decay. We expect this sort of behavior to be generic in systems of this
kind. We show such signatures persist in a continuum field theory. This also
opens the possibility of similar signatures of the potential metastable false
vacuum of our universe well before the beginning of a decay process to the true
vacuum.
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