English

Occurrence of semiclassical vacuum decay

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2020-01-16 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Recently, a novel phenomenon is observed for vacuum decay to proceed via classically allowed dynamical evolution from initial configurations of false vacuum fluctuations. With the help of some occasionally developed large fluctuations in time derivative of a homogeneous scalar field that is initially sitting at the false vacuum, the flyover vacuum decay is proposed if the initial Gaussian profile of field velocity contains a spatial region where the field velocity is large enough to flyover the potential barrier. In this paper, we point out that, even if the initial profile of field velocity is nowhere to be large enough to classically overcome the barrier, the semiclassical vacuum decay could still be possible if the initial profile of field velocity extends over large enough region.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.11196,
  title  = {Occurrence of semiclassical vacuum decay},
  author = {Shao-Jiang Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.11196},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

v1, 9 pages, 6 figures; v2, to match the published version in PRD, title slightly changed by editor

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:24:53.246Z