Related papers: Vacuum Decay in the Standard Model: Analytical Res…
The quantum decay of a metastable vacuum is exponentially suppressed by a tunneling action that can be calculated in the semi-classical approximation as the Euclidean action of a bounce that interpolates between the false and true phases.…
The Standard Model Higgs potential may become unbounded from below at large field values, with important cosmological implications. For a potential of this form, the commonly assumed scenario of a nucleated thin-wall bubble driving the…
The tunneling potential method to calculate the action for vacuum decay is an alternative to the Euclidean bounce method that has a number of attractive features. In this paper we extend the formalism to general spacetime dimension $d>2$…
We present a fast and efficient method for studying vacuum stability constraints in multi-scalar theories beyond the Standard Model. This method is designed for a reliable use in large scale parameter scans. The minimization of the scalar…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
If the Higgs mass m_H is as low as suggested by present experimental information, the Standard Model ground state might not be absolutely stable. We present a detailed analysis of the lower bounds on m_H imposed by the requirement that the…
We consider the decay of "false kinks," that is, kinks formed in a scalar field theory with a pair of degenerate symmetry-breaking false vacua in 1+1 dimensions. The true vacuum is symmetric. A second scalar field and a peculiar potential…
The tunneling potential formalism makes it easy to construct exact solutions to the vacuum decay problem in potentials with multiple fields. While some exact solutions for single-field decays were known, we present the first nontrivial…
Recently, the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable vacua, has been reformulated as an elementary variational problem in field space. This paper extends this formalism to…
An alternative approach to the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable phases, is presented. The new method circumvents the use of bounces in Euclidean space by introducing an…
We formulate a procedure to obtain a gauge-invariant tunneling rate at zero temperature using the recently developed tunneling potential approach. This procedure relies on a consistent power counting in gauge coupling and a derivative…
In this paper, we numerically study the impact heavy field degrees of freedom have on vacuum metastability in a toy model, with the aim of better understanding how the decoupling theorem extends to semiclassical processes. We observe that…
If we imagine rewinding the universe to early times, the scale factor shrinks and the existence of a finite spatial volume may play a role in quantum tunnelling effects in a closed universe. It has recently been shown that such finite…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting…
Metastable states decay at zero temperature through quantum tunneling at an exponentially small rate, which depends on the Coleman-de Luccia instanton, also known as bounce. In some theories, the bounce may not exist or its on-shell action…
In the case of a metastable electroweak vacuum the quantum corrected effective potential plays a crucial role in the potential instability of the Standard Model. In the Early Universe, in particular during inflation and reheating, this…
We derive the decay rate of an unstable phase of a quantum field theory in the presence of an impurity in the thin-wall approximation. This derivation is based on the how the impurity changes the (flat spacetime) geometry relative to case…
Whether the Standard Model electroweak vacuum is stable, metastable or unstable depends crucially on the top mass (and, to a lesser extent, on other measurable quantities). These topics are reviewed and updated by taking into account the…
We study Coleman-De Luccia tunneling of the Standard Model Higgs field during inflation in the case when the electroweak vacuum is metastable. We verify that the tunneling rate is exponentially suppressed. The main contribution to the…