Spacetime and vacuum as seen from Moscow

An extended text of the talk given at the conference ``2001: A Spacetime Odyssey'', to be published in the Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 21-25 May 2001, M.J. Duff and J.T. Liu eds., World Scientific, Singapore, 2002; and of Historical Lecture ``Vacuum as seen from Moscow'' at the CERN Summer School, 10 August, 2001. Contents: Introduction; Pomeranchuk on vacuum; Landau on parity, P, and combined parity, CP; Search and discovery of $K_L^0 \to \pi^+ \pi^-$; "Mirror world"; Zeldovich and cosmological term; QCD vacuum condensates; Sakharov and baryonic asymmetry of the universe, BAU; Kirzhnits and phase transitions; Vacuum domain walls; Monopoles, strings, instantons, and sphalerons; False vacuum; Inflation; Brane and Bulk; Acknowledgments; References.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

One-Loop Renormalization of a Self-Interacting Scalar Field in Nonsimply Connected Spacetimes

Using the effective potential, we study the one-loop renormalization of a massive self-interacting scalar field at finite temperature in flat manifolds with one or more compactified spatial dimensions. We prove that, owing to the compactification and finite temperature, the renormalized physical parameters of the theory (mass and coupling constant) acquire thermal and topological contributions. In the case of one compactified spatial dimension at finite temperature, we find that the corrections to the mass are positive, but those to the coupling constant are negative. We discuss the possibility of triviality, i.e. that the renormalized coupling constant goes to zero at some temperature or at some radius of the compactified spatial dimension.Comment: 16 pages, plain LATE

Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe in the Standard Model

We study the interactions of quarks and antiquarks with the changing Higgs field during the electroweak phase transition, including quantum mechanical and some thermal effects, with the only source of CP violation being the known CKM phase. The magnitude and sign of the predicted BAU agrees with the observed value, with moderately optimistic assumptions about the dynamics of the phase transition. At present uncertainties related to the dynamics of the ew phase transition and the oversimplifications of our treatment are too great to decide whether or not this is the correct explanation for the presence of remnant matter in our universe, however the present work makes it clear that the minimal standard model cannot be discounted as a contender for explaining this phenomenon.Comment: 121pp plus 14 figures, CERN-TH.6734/93 and RU-93-11. latex. This is an extended version of the preprint originally issued in May, 1993. It corrects some typographical errors and has been somewhat reorganized (e.g., moving more to the appendices) and elaborated (especially the section on analytic results) in order to make it more readily understandable. In addition we include two effects which were previously neglected: $L-R$ mixing due to QCD sphalerons, and a diminution of the electroweak gauge and Higgs effects in the broken phase due to mass corrections in the 1-loop approximation to th