Approximating tunneling rates in multi-dimensional field spaces
Abstract
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an important role in settling our universe into its current vacuum, and they may also happen in future. The most important frameworks where vacuum decay happens contain a large number of fields. Unfortunately, calculating the tunneling rates in these models is very time-consuming. In this paper we present a simple approximation for the tunneling rate by reducing it to a one-field problem which is easy to calculate. We demonstrate the validity of this approximation using our recent code "Anybubble" for several classes of potentials.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1702.00356,
title = {Approximating tunneling rates in multi-dimensional field spaces},
author = {Ali Masoumi and Ken D. Olum and Jeremy M. Wachter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.00356},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
11 pages, 4 figures. v2: Replace right hand panel of figure 4 with a potential of the right form