Thermal false vacuum decay in (1+1) dimensions: Evidence for nonequilibrium dynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we numerically study the evolution of a classical real scalar field in [Formula: see text] dimensions with initial conditions describing thermal fluctuations around a metastable vacuum. We track false vacuum decay in real time and compare several observables to the predictions of the standard Euclidean formalism. We find agreement for the shape of the critical bubble and the exponential suppression of the decay rate. However, the decay rate prefactor is almost an order of magnitude lower than the predicted value. We argue that this signals a breakdown of thermal equilibrium during the bubble nucleation. In addition, the inefficient thermalization in the system biases the properties of the statistical ensemble and leads to further decrease of the decay rate with time. We substantiate our interpretation with a suite of stochastic field simulations with controlled thermalization time. By varying this time, we find that the predictions of the standard equilibrium formalism are recovered when it is sufficiently short. We propose an upper bound on the thermalization time that must be satisfied in order to ensure the applicability of the Euclidean rate calculation. We discuss that this bound is unavoidably violated in common single-field models, irrespective of the number of space–time dimensions, implying that deviations from equilibrium in these models cannot be neglected. In theories with multiple fields, the bound may or may not hold, depending on the setup details. We investigate one more signature of nonequilibrium dynamics — coherent oscillonic precursors to the critical bubble nucleation. We show that they get suppressed in the stochastic dynamical simulations when the thermalization time is reduced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".