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Instability of bubble expansion at zero temperature

Wen-Yuan Ai1,*, Juan S. Cruz2,†, Björn Garbrecht3,‡, and Carlos Tamarit3,§

  • 1Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
  • 2CP3-Origins, Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark
  • 3Physik Department T70, James-Franck-Straße, Technische Universität München, 85748 Garching, Germany

  • *wenyuan.ai@kcl.ac.uk
  • †jcr@sdu.dk
  • ‡garbrecht@tum.de
  • §carlos.tamarit@tum.de
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Phys. Rev. D 107, 036014 – Published 15 February, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.036014

Abstract

In the context of false vacuum decay at zero temperature, it is well known that bubbles expand with uniform proper acceleration. We show that this uniformly accelerating expansion suffers from an instability related to the bubble size. This can be observed in Minkowski spacetime as a tachyonic mode in the spectrum of fluctuations for the energy functional in the reference frame in which the uniformly accelerating bubble wall appears static. In such a frame, arbitrary small perturbations cause an amplifying departure from the static wall solution. This implies that the nucleated bubble is not a critical point of the energy functional in the rest frame of nucleation but becomes one in the accelerating frame. The aforementioned instability for vacuum bubbles can be related to the well-known instability for the nucleated critical static bubbles during finite-temperature phase transitions in the rest frame of the plasma. It is therefore proposed that zero-temperature vacuum decays as seen from accelerating frames have a dual description in terms of finite-temperature phase transitions.

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Phys. Rev. D 107, 036014– Published 15 February, 2023
  • Received 7 September 2022
  • Accepted 13 January 2023
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