Stochastic Bubble Completion in de Sitter Space: Power Spectrum, Bispectrum, and Infrared Moment Hierarchies
astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-ph, hep-th
Submitted: 2026-10-06
Updated: 2026-10-06
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Stochastic bubble nucleation makes the local completion time of a first-order phase transition a random spatial field.
Terminology
Abstract
Stochastic bubble nucleation makes the local completion time of a first-order phase transition a random spatial field. We study its power spectrum and equilateral bispectrum in Minkowski and de Sitter backgrounds, with particular emphasis on the infrared consequences of a finite transition duration. In an eternally extended de Sitter history, rare bubbles nucleated in the remote past generate an ancient-bubble tail that produces a hierarchy of infrared-sensitive spatial moments. For the two-point function, the first finite- k correction becomes tail sensitive at H/β=1/5, while the leading moment becomes singular at H/β=1/3. The corresponding three-point thresholds are H/β=1/8 and 1/6, showing that the bispectrum is more infrared sensitive than the power spectrum. For any finite starting time, however, the ancient-bubble tail is cut off, all spatial moments remain finite, and the strict infrared spectra recover the analytic white-noise limits P τ proportional to k cubed and B eq τ proportional to k 6. The eternal-background thresholds instead control the duration dependence of the moment coefficients and the crossover into an intermediate tail-sensitive regime, in agreement with our numerical calculations. We further show that temporal localization of the nucleation history provides a smooth regulator of the ancient-bubble tail and restores the same analytic infrared limits. These results establish a general first-arrival framework for completion-time fluctuations and clarify how de Sitter expansion can generate distinct power-spectrum and bispectrum infrared hierarchies relevant to curvature perturbations and non-Gaussianity.
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