Tunneling in a Time Dependent Setting

A standard approach to analyzing tunneling processes in various physical contexts is to use instanton or imaginary time path techniques. For systems in which the tunneling takes place in a time dependent setting, the standard methods are often applicable only in special cases, e.g. due to some additional symmetries. We consider a collection of time dependent tunneling problems to which the standard methods cannot be applied directly, and present an algorithm, based on the WKB approximation combined with complex time path methods, which can be used to calculate the relevant tunneling probabilities. This collection of problems contains, among others, the spontaneous nucleation of topological defects in an expanding universe, the production of particle - antiparticle pairs in a time dependent electric field, and false vacuum decay in field theory from a coherently oscillating initial state. To demonstrate the method, we present detailed calculations of the time dependent decay rates for the last two examples.Comment: 29 pages, with 9 Postscript figures, uses epsf.tex and fps.st

Notes on Branes in Matrix Theory

We study the effective actions of various brane configurations in Matrix theory. Starting from the 0+1 dimensional quantum mechanics, we replace coordinate matrices by covariant derivatives in the large N limit, thereby obtaining effective field theories on the brane world volumes. Even for noncompact branes, these effective theories are of Yang-Mills type, with constant background magnetic fields. In the case of a D2-brane, we show explicitly how the effective action equals the large magnetic field limit of the Born-Infeld action, and thus derive from Matrix theory the action used by Polchinski and Pouliot to compute M-momentum transfer between membranes. We also consider the effect of compactifying transverse directions. Finally, we analyze a scattering process involving a recently proposed background representing a classically stable D6+D0 brane configuration. We compute the potential between this configuration and a D0-brane, and show that the result agrees with supergravity.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX file. Minor typo correction

Timelike Boundary Sine-Gordon Theory and Two-Component Plasma

It has long been known that there is a relation between boundary sine-Gordon theory and thermodynamics of charge neutral two-component Coulomb plasma on a unit circle. On the other hand, recently it was found that open string worldsheet description of brane decay can be related to a sequence of points of thermodynamic equilibrium of one-component plasma. Here we consider a different decay process which is specifically described by the timelike boundary sine-Gordon theory. We find time evolution to be mapped to a one-dimensional curve in the space of points of thermal equilibrium of a non-neutral two-component Coulomb plasma. We compute the free energy of the system and find that along the curve it is monotonously decreasing, defining a thermodynamic arrow of time.Comment: 11 pages, v2: reference adde

The Ground State Structure and Modular Transformations of Fractional Quantum Hall States on a Torus

The structure of ground states of generic FQH states on a torus is studied by using both effective theory and electron wave function. The relation between the effective theory and the wave function becomes transparent when one considers the ground state structure. We find that the non-abelian Berry's phases of the abelian Hall states generated by twisting the mass matrix are identical to the modular transformation matrix for the characters of a Gaussian conformal field theory. We also show that the Haldane-Rezayi spin singlet state has a ten fold degeneracy on a torus which indicates such a state is a non-abelian Hall state.Comment: 28 pages, LATEX, 9 figures available by request from authors, CTP-2197 (two references added + some minor typos corrected