Rest frame of bubble nucleation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the rest frame of bubble nucleation in quantum field theory, showing that nucleation occurs with a highly localized velocity near zero relative to the detector, with implications for understanding vacuum decay.

Contribution

It refines previous models by quantifying the typical relative velocity between nucleation and detector frames, demonstrating a sharp correlation in the nucleation process.

Findings

Relative velocity between nucleation and detector is at most ~ S_E^{-1/3}

Velocity uncertainty matches the minimum quantum uncertainty in electric fields

Strong momentum asymmetry persists near the turning point in semiclassical trajectories

Abstract

Vacuum bubbles nucleate at rest with a certain critical size and subsequently expand. But what selects the rest frame of nucleation? This question has been recently addressed in [1] in the context of Schwinger pair production in 1+1 dimensions, by using a model detector in order to probe the nucleated pairs. The analysis in [1] showed that, for a constant external electric field, the adiabatic "in" vacuum of charged particles is Lorentz invariant, and in this case pairs tend to nucleate preferentially at rest with respect to the detector. Here, we sharpen this picture by showing that the typical relative velocity between the frame of nucleation and that of the detector is at most of order \Delta v ~ S_E^{-1/3} << 1. Here, S_E >> 1 is the action of the instanton describing pair creation. The bound \Delta v coincides with the minimum uncertainty in the velocity of a non-relativistic charged particle embedded in a constant electric field. A velocity of order \Delta v is reached after a time interval of order \Delta t ~ S_E^{-1/3} r_0 << r_0 past the turning point in the semiclassical trajectory, where r_0 is the size of the instanton. If the interaction takes place in the vicinity of the turning point, the semiclassical description of collision does not apply. Nonetheless, we find that even in this case there is still a strong asymmetry in the momentum transferred from the nucleated particles to the detector, in the direction of expansion after the turning point. We conclude that the correlation between the rest frame of nucleation and that of the detector is exceedingly sharp.