Tunneling in Axion Monodromy
High Energy Physics - Theory
2016-11-03 v1
Abstract
The Coleman formula for vacuum decay and bubble nucleation has been used to estimate the tunneling rate in models of axion monodromy in recent literature. However, several of Coleman's original assumptions do not hold for such models. Here we derive a new estimate with this in mind using a similar Euclidean procedure. We find that there are significant regions of parameter space for which the tunneling rate in axion monodromy is not well approximated by the Coleman formula. However, there is also a regime relevant to large field inflation in which both estimates parametrically agree. We also briefly comment on the applications of our results to the relaxion scenario.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.00037,
title = {Tunneling in Axion Monodromy},
author = {Jon Brown and William Cottrell and Gary Shiu and Pablo Soler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.00037},
year = {2016}
}