Cosmological Vacuum Decays from Schwinger-Keldysh Formalism
Abstract
In this work, we take a first step to a stochastic real-time description of the vacuum phase transitions in a radiation-dominated FLRW universe from the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. By splitting the phase transition field Φ into the long-wavelength mode ϕ and the short-wavelength mode σ and tracing over the latter as the environment, we obtain a classical Langevin-type equation-of-motion for the long-wavelength field ϕ, where the quantum effects are encoded in a non-Markov memory kernel and a non-Gaussian noise. As a phenomenological example, we start from a polynomial potential and a thermalized initial state, and study the structure of the memory kernel as well as the correlation functions of the noise term. Further extensions remain possible to describe the whole dynamics of cosmological first-order phase transitions via numerical simulations.
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BibTeX
@misc{yuwen2026cosmological,
title = {{Cosmological Vacuum Decays from Schwinger-Keldysh Formalism}},
author = {Zi-Yan Yuwen},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.12736},
eprint = {2608.12736},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12736},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Cosmological Vacuum Decays from Schwinger-Keldysh Formalism
AU - Zi-Yan Yuwen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.12736
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12736
AB - In this work, we take a first step to a stochastic real-time description of the vacuum phase transitions in a radiation-dominated FLRW universe from the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. By splitting the phase transition field Φ into the long-wavelength mode ϕ and the short-wavelength mode σ and tracing over the latter as the environment, we obtain a classical Langevin-type equation-of-motion for the long-wavelength field ϕ, where the quantum effects are encoded in a non-Markov memory kernel and a non-Gaussian noise. As a phenomenological example, we start from a polynomial potential and a thermalized initial state, and study the structure of the memory kernel as well as the correlation functions of the noise term. Further extensions remain possible to describe the whole dynamics of cosmological first-order phase transitions via numerical simulations.
ER -