Gauge-independence of tunneling rates
High Energy Physics - Theory
2016-11-24 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Abstract
It is shown that tunneling rates can be defined in terms of a false-vacuum effective action whose reality and convexity properties differ from those of the corresponding groundstate functional. The tunneling rate is directly related to the false-vacuum effective action evaluated at an extremal "quantum bounce". The Nielsen identities of the false-vacuum functional ensure that the rate remains independent of the choice of gauge-fixing. Our results are nonperturbative and clarify issues related with convexity and radiative corrections.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1611.07557,
title = {Gauge-independence of tunneling rates},
author = {Alexis D. Plascencia and Carlos Tamarit},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.07557},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
6 pages. Contribution to the Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics, ICHEP 2016, Chicago, IL, USA