Related papers: Tunneling Potentials for the Tunneling Action: Gau…
In principle, observables as for example the sphaleron rate or the tunneling rate in a first-order phase transition are gauge-independent. However, in practice a gauge dependence is introduced in explicit perturbative calculations due to…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
A new class of renormalizable gauges is introduced that is particularly well suited to compute effective potentials in spontaneously broken gauge theories. It allows one to keep free gauge parameters when computing the effective potential…
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…
A new formulation for obtaining the tunneling action for vacuum decay based on the so-called tunneling potential was developed recently. In the original derivation, the new action was obtained by requiring that its variation led to the…
We propose a gauge invariant formulation of the effective potential in terms of a gauge invariant order parameter, for the Abelian Higgs model. The one-loop contribution at zero and finite temperature is computed explicitly, and the leading…
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…
Ab initio instanton rate theory is a computational method for rigorously including tunnelling effects into calculations of chemical reaction rates based on a potential-energy surface computed on the fly from electronic-structure theory.…
A gauge-invariant framework for computing bubble nucleation rates at finite temperature in the presence of radiative barriers was presented and advocated for model-building and phenomenological studies in an accompanying article…
We explicitly show perturbative gauge fixing independence of the tunneling rate to a stable radiatively induced vacuum in the abelian Higgs model. We work with a class of $R_\xi$ gauges in the presence of both dimensionless and dimensionful…
The effective action of a Higgs theory should be gauge-invariant. However, the quantum and/or thermal contributions to the effective potential seem to be gauge-dependent, posing a problem for its physical interpretation. In this paper, we…
The problem of defining a gauge invariant effective potential with a strict energetic interpretation is examined in the context of spontaneously broken gauge theories. It is shown that such a potential can be defined in terms of a composite…
The so-called Unitary Gauge Puzzle is re-examined in the light of a set of gauge dependence identities discovered by Kobes, Kunstatter and Rebhan. The ``puzzle'' is discovered to arise as an artifact of the gauge-variant and off-shell…
We point out the necessity of resolving the apparent gauge dependence in the quantum corrections of cosmological observables for Higgs-like inflation models. We highlight the fact that this gauge dependence is due to the use of an…
We clarify issues of convexity, gauge-dependence and radiative corrections in relation to tunneling rates. Despite the gauge dependence of the effective action at zero and finite temperature, it is shown that tunneling and nucleation rates…
For the theory of a single scalar field $\varphi$ with a quartic potential $V(\varphi)$, we find semi-analytic expressions for the Euclidean action in both four and three dimensions. The action in four dimensions determines the quantum…
We study the contribution of finite energy tunneling to the total vacuum transition rate in a system at finite temperature. We find that in certain models, such as the 1+1 Abelian Higgs model, the quantum contribution is non-negligible even…
In this letter we explore the dependence on the gauge fixing condition of several quantities in the U(1) Higgs model at finite temperature and chemical potential. We compute the effective potential at the one loop level, using a gauge…
We study a finite temperature two-loop resummed effective potential in the Abelian gauge theory. A tractable calculation scheme without using a high-temperature expansion is devised. We apply it to the Abelian-Higgs model and its extension…
We propose a new approach for computing tunneling rates in quantum or thermal field theory with multiple scalar fields. It is based on exact analytical solutions of piecewise linear potentials with many segments that describes any given…