English

BubbleDet: A Python package to compute functional determinants for bubble nucleation

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2024-01-10 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We present a Python package, BubbleDet, for computing one-loop functional determinants around spherically symmetric background fields. This gives the next-to-leading order correction to both the vacuum decay rate, at zero temperature, and to the bubble nucleation rate in first-order phase transitions at finite temperature. For predictions of gravitational wave signals from cosmological phase transitions, this is expected to remove one of the leading sources of theoretical uncertainty. BubbleDet is applicable to arbitrary scalar potentials and in any dimension up to seven. It has methods for fluctuations of scalar fields, including Goldstone bosons, and for gauge fields, but is limited to cases where the determinant factorises into a product of separate determinants, one for each field degree of freedom. To our knowledge, BubbleDet is the first package dedicated to calculating functional determinants in spherically symmetric background

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.15652,
  title  = {BubbleDet: A Python package to compute functional determinants for bubble nucleation},
  author = {Andreas Ekstedt and Oliver Gould and Joonas Hirvonen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.15652},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Added a few comments and clarifications

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:07:52.566Z