false vacuum

plural false vacuums · plural false vacua · alternative attributive false-vacuum

1. natural sciencesA (hypothetical) metastable vacuum whose energy state is at a local minimum different from the global minimum; a vacuum that is relatively stable and long-lived but which still may decay to a lower-energy state.

   2010, Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here, Oneworld Publications, eBook Edition, When a field is stuck in a false vacuum, it wants to decay to the lower-energy true vacuum.

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   1989, Alan Guth, Paul Steinhardt, The inflationary universe, Paul Davies, The New Physics, Cambridge University Press, 2000 (1992) Paperback Edition, page 57, The energy density of the false vacuum can be attributed entirely to the Higgs fields. Furthermore, as can be seen in figure 3.5, any deviation of the Higgs fields from their false-vacuum values would require an increase in energy density. This implies that the false vacuum has a peculiar property which distinguishes it from all familiar materials: when the volume of a region of false vacuum is increased, the energy density cannot decrease, but instead remains at a constant value.

   False vacua play an important role in models of the inflationary universe and elsewhere. In the following we consider first (after some recapitulations) a simple model of a false vacuum.

   2012, Harald J. W. Mueller-Kirsten, Introduction To Quantum Mechanics, 2nd edition, World Scientific, page 729