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Physics
High Energy, Nuclear, Particle Physics
Bubble nucleation and metastable vacuum
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[QUOTE="dRic2, post: 6591347, member: 638830"] I am not at all educated in QFT, so I read this wiki page ([URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay[/URL]). Water can be found in the liquid phase even above 100 degrees C (at 1 atm). It is in a local minimum of the free energy so it is "relatively" stable. The thing is that, even if the gas phase is energetically favorable, it takes energy to create a bubble because you have to break water's surface tension to create a gas-liquid interface. This is the process of nucleation. It seems that when the "false" vacuum decays, the "true" vacuum appears in the systems like a bubble of water vapor in a bowl of water. So they just use all the know equations that were developed in the theory of nucleation to estimate stuff for this model. To me, it is just a matter of names, but I am not educated on this topic so I am just guessing. The connection to phase transitions I guess is because of fluctuations. It seems to me that this metastable vacuum could decay due to quantum fluctuations. A similar thing happens in the liquid-vapor phase transition: the density of the liquid fluctuates in the system when you get close to the transition temperature and when the fluctuations are too big you will have that, in some small volume region, the density is low enough that a bubble of vapor forms. [/QUOTE]
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Bubble nucleation and metastable vacuum
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