Related papers: Analytic thin wall false vacuum decay rate
With the Higgs mass now measured at the sub-percent level, the potential metastability of the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model (SM) motivates renewed study of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this note, we describe an…
For a scalar theory whose classical scale invariance is broken by quantum effects, we compute self-consistent bounce solutions and Green's functions. Deriving analytic expressions, we find that the latter are similar to the Green's…
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…
In $N+1$ dimensions, false vacuum decay at zero temperature is dominated by the $O(N+1)$ symmetric instanton, a sphere of radius $R_0$, whereas at temperatures $T>>R_0^{-1}$, the decay is dominated by a `cylindrical' (static) $O(N)$…
We develop a new iterative method for finding approximate solutions for spherical bounces associated with the decay of the false vacuum in scalar field theories. The method works for any generic potential in any number of dimensions,…
This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We study a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum fluctuates…
We examine the computation of the nucleation barrier used in the expression for false vacuum decay rates in finite temperature field theory. By a detailed analysis of the determinantal prefactor, we show that the correct bounce solution…
We study radiative corrections to the decay rate of false vacua, paying particular attention to the renormalization-scale dependence of the decay rate. The decay rate exponentially depends on the bounce action. The bounce action itself is…
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 extend our previous results of simplified expressions for functional determinants for radial Schr\"odinger operators to the computation of vacuum energy, or mass corrections, for static but spatially radial backgrounds, and for domain…
We compute bounce solutions describing false vacuum decay in a Phi**4 model in two dimensions in the Hartree approximation, thus going beyond the usual one-loop corrections to the decay rate. We use zero energy mode functions of the…
We study zero-temperature false vacuum decay in $D$ compact spatial dimensions and show that for volumes below a critical value a new bounce solution, different from Coleman's celebrated $O(D)$ bubble, mediates the decay process, and…
Thermalisation of configurations with initial white noise power spectrum is studied in numerical simulations of a classical one-component $\Phi^4$ theory in 2+1 dimensions, coupled to a small amplitude homogenous external field. The study…
We propose a simple non-perturbative formalism for false vacuum decay using functional methods. We introduce the quasi-stationary effective action, a bounce action that non-perturbatively incorporates radiative corrections and is robust to…
We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub…
Scalar field theory with an asymmetric potential is studied at zero temperature and high-temperature for $\phi^6$ potential. The equations of motion are solved numerically to obtain O(4) spherical symmetric and O(3) cylindrical symmetric…
By introducing the self-energy density functionals for the dissipative interactions between the reduced system and its environment, we develop a time-dependent density-functional theory formalism based on an equation of motion for the…
The pre-exponential factor in the probability of decay of a metastable vacuum is calculated for a generic (2+1) dimensional model in the limit of small difference $\epsilon$ of the energy density between the metastable and the stable vacua.…
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…
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…