Speaker
Description
In this talk, we study thermal nucleation in quantum field theories in real time. We begin by discussing an effective description of the real-time plasma emerging from the Schwinger–Keldysh formalism. This description consists of a Boltzmann equation for out-of-equilibrium particles and a classical field equation for a fluctuating scalar field responsible for nucleation. We show that, at the order considered in perturbation theory, the scalar potential coincides with the corresponding equilibrium effective potential. Applying classical nucleation theory to this framework yields a nucleation rate formula. Our results corroborate the standard equilibrium predictions up to a certain level of accuracy, while also incorporating real-time corrections. We also identify an infrared divergence associated with out-of-equilibrium bosonic contributions, highlighting an important direction for future work.