Instability of bubble expansion at zero temperature

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that bubble expansion at zero temperature is unstable due to a tachyonic mode, linking vacuum decay in accelerating frames to finite-temperature phase transition instabilities.

Contribution

It reveals an instability in uniformly accelerating bubble expansion at zero temperature and proposes a duality with finite-temperature phase transition phenomena.

Findings

Identifies a tachyonic instability in bubble fluctuations.

Shows the instability depends on the frame of reference.

Proposes a dual description connecting zero-temperature decay to finite-temperature transitions.

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.