Gravitational waves from Higgs domain walls

The effective potential for the Standard Model Higgs field allows two quasi-degenerate vacua; one is our vacuum at the electroweak scale, while the other is at a much higher scale. The latter minimum may be at a scale much smaller than the Planck scale, if the potential is lifted by new physics. This gives rise to a possibility of domain wall formation after inflation. If the high-scale minimum is a local minimum, domain walls are unstable and disappear through violent annihilation processes, producing a significant amount of gravitational waves. We estimate the amount of gravitational waves produced from unstable domain walls in the Higgs potential and discuss detectability with future experiments.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; v2: title changed, comments and references added; v3: accepted for publication in PL

Characterizing common cause closedness of quantum probability theories

We prove new results on common cause closedness of quantum probability spaces, where by a quantum probability space is meant the projection lattice of a non-commutative von Neumann algebra together with a countably additive probability measure on the lattice. Common cause closedness is the feature that for every correlation between a pair of commuting projections there exists in the lattice a third projection commuting with both of the correlated projections and which is a Reichenbachian common cause of the correlation. The main result we prove is that a quantum probability space is common cause closed if and only if it has at most one measure theoretic atom. This result improves earlier ones published in Z. GyenisZ and M. Redei Erkenntnis 79 (2014) 435-451. The result is discussed from the perspective of status of the Common Cause Principle. Open problems on common cause closedness of general probability spaces $(\mathcal{L},\phi)$ are formulated, where $\mathcal{L}$ is an orthomodular bounded lattice and $\phi$ is a probability measure on $\mathcal{L}$.Comment: Submitted for publicatio