Thermal Nucleation with Off-Equilibrium Plasma in Quantum Field Theories

by Joonas Hirvonen (U. of Nottingham)

Thursday 13 Nov 2025, 16:00 → 18:00 Asia/Seoul

B447-1 (CTPU-CGA)

In this talk, we will for the first time relax the assumption that thermal particles remain in equilibrium during the event of bubble formation. We begin by discussing the importance of nucleation rates in cosmological first-order phase transitions, followed by brief overviews of a real-time description of high-temperature plasmas and classical nucleation theory. By combining these two frameworks, we are able to handle off-equilibrium thermal particles during bubble nucleation. Relaxing the long-standing assumption, which could seem to radically change the dynamics, turns out to corroborate equilibrium computations of the nucleation rate up to a certain accuracy. Moreover, it yields a formula for potentially significant corrections to the rate and points toward future directions involving off-equilibrium infrared bosons, signaled by an infrared divergence.