Cosmological Bubbles and Solitons

by Tom Giblin (Kenyon College and Perimeter Institute)

Friday 12 Mar 2010, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

Auditoire 234 (Univ. de Geneve)

Cosmological bubble collisions arising from first order phase transitions are a generic consequence of the Eternal Inflation scenario. I will present our computational strategy for generating and evolving these bubbles in 3+1 dimensions and in a self- consistently expanding background. I will show the existence of classical field transitions--the classical nucleation of bubbles during collisions--which can dramatically alter the canonical description of eternal inflation.