English

Vacuum Decay in CFT and the Riemann-Hilbert problem

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-03-25 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study vacuum stability in 1+1 dimensional Conformal Field Theories with external background fields. We show that the vacuum decay rate is given by a non-local two-form. This two-form is a boundary term that must be added to the effective in/out Lagrangian. The two-form is expressed in terms of a Riemann-Hilbert decomposition for background gauge fields, and its novel "functional" version in the gravitational case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.06721,
  title  = {Vacuum Decay in CFT and the Riemann-Hilbert problem},
  author = {Guilherme L. Pimentel and Alexander M. Polyakov and Grigory M. Tarnopolsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.06721},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

16 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:15:07.900Z