CCS Seminar
Friday - April 27, 2007
12:00 noon
Physics Research Building - Room 595
Professor Marcelo Gleiser - Department of Physics & Astronomy - Dartmouth

"Oscillons: Properties and Applications of the Lumps that Wouldn't Die"

Abstract: I will present some properties of oscillons, time-dependent localized configurations that are surprisingly long-lived, examining their existence in an arbitrary number of spatial dimensions and in several models, including the Abelian Higgs model. I will then show how the presence of oscillons after a rapid quench can dramatically speed-up the nucleation rate in first order phase transitions in 2 and 3 spatial dimensions, turning the usual exponential suppression of homogeneous nucleation into a power law.