Related papers: Pseudo-Bounces vs. New Instantons
The false vacua of some potentials do not decay via Euclidean bounces. This typically happens for tunneling actions with a flat direction (in field configuration space) that is lifted by a perturbation into a sloping valley, pushing the…
In the standard lore the decay of the false vacuum of a single-field potential is described by a semi-classical Euclidean bounce configuration that can be found using overshoot/undershoot algorithms, and whose action suppresses…
We study tunneling between vacua in multi-dimensional field spaces. Working in the strict thin wall approximation, we find that the conventional instantons for false vacuum decay develop a new vanishing eigenvalue in their fluctuation…
Based on the gradient flow, we propose a new method to determine the bounce configuration for false vacuum decay. Our method is applicable to a large class of models with multiple fields. Since the bounce is a saddle point of an action, a…
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…
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 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.…
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…
Sometimes a local minimum is known to be a metastable vacuum inside the low-energy EFT, but the true vacuum lies outside, and the bounce solution mediating the decay cannot be found. For single-field decay, Espinosa has proposed a family of…
We develop a new method for estimating the decay probability of the false vacuum via regularized instantons. Namely, we consider the case where the potential is either unbounded from below or the second minimum corresponding to the true…
The decay rate of a false vacuum is determined by the minimal action solution of the tunnelling field: bounce. In this Letter, we focus on models with scalar fields which have a canonical kinetic term in $N(>2)$ dimensional Euclidean space,…
Instantons are tunneling solutions that connect two vacua, and under a small change in the potential, instantons sometimes disappear. We classify these disappearances as smooth (decay rate goes to 0 at disappearance) or abrupt (decay rate…
It is shown that nonvacuum pseudoparticles can account for quantum tunneling and metastability. In particular the saddle-point nature of the pseudoparticles is demonstrated, and the evaluation of path-integrals in their neighbourhood.…
We investigate the bounce solutions in vacuum decay problems. We show that it is possible to have a stable false vacuum in a potential that is unbounded from below.
Based on the new valley equation, we propose the most plausible method for constructing instanton-like configurations in the theory where the presence of a mass scale prevents the existence of the classical solution with a finite radius. We…
We consider the decay of vortices trapped in the false vacuum of a theory of scalar electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions. The potential is inspired by models with intermediate symmetry breaking to a metastable vacuum that completely breaks a…
I provide some simple physical arguments that, once gravitation and some subtleties are taken into account, rather broad classes of potentials result in instantons which tunnel relatively rapidly between perturbatively stable minima. In…
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…
We study the gauge invariance of the decay rate of the false vacuum for the model in which the scalar field responsible for the false vacuum decay has gauge quantum number. In order to calculate the decay rate, one should integrate out the…
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…