# I Expansion Rate of Cosmic Bubbles

1. Dec 12, 2017

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
Here is a link to Sidney Coleman's seminal paper Fate of the false vacuum: Semiclassical theory in the KEK library. He discusses a setting that is not eternal inflation, but where the false vacuum has zero energy density and essentially gives Minkowski space as the solution. In figure 4 you can see exactly the acceleration of the wall mentioned by @kimbyd.

Side note: This paper contains one of my favourite quotes across all physics papers that I have read. It highlights a somewhat morbid sense of humour in Coleman (my clarifications in square brackets):
Edit: Here is a link to the same paper from Princeton with much nicer formatting.

2. Dec 12, 2017

### kimbyd

I found this paper which attempts to do a detailed treatment of the dynamics of domain walls:
https://arxiv.org/abs/0811.0866

It's quite dense, unfortunately, but it describes a picture where once a new domain starts to form, it transitions from no acceleration to constant acceleration, which means the domain wall asymptotically approaches the speed of light.

3. Dec 12, 2017

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus

4. Dec 13, 2017

### bapowell

5. Dec 13, 2017

### kimbyd

This is off the top of my head, but it probably stems from the boundary conditions. Consider that you're transitioning from a state with $H^2 = \Lambda$ (with the appropriate constant conversion factor I'm not going to bother with right now) to a state with a lower cosmological constant. This results in an immediate decrease in the energy density associated with the cosmological constant, but the rate of expansion would (initially) remain the same. If this energy density didn't go into any other matter/radiation field, or if there was an equal amount of energy density in matter and radiation produced but not all of it ended up within the expanding bubble, then there would be a discrepancy that would show up as negative curvature.

So if I were to guess, the details of the spatial curvature are all about how the transition to a lower vacuum energy interacts with matter/radiation, and how that matter/radiation is distributed as the boundary wall expands.