Related papers: Instantons: thick-wall approximation
The 'thin-wall approximation' gives a simple estimate of the decay rate of an unstable quantum field. Unfortunately, the approximation is uncontrolled. In this paper I show that there are actually two different thin-wall approximations and…
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…
This is the first in a series of papers where we study the dynamics of a bubble wall beyond usual approximations, such as the assumptions of spherical bubbles and infinitely thin walls. In this paper, we consider a vacuum phase transition.…
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…
We consider a wave-function approach to the false vacuum decay with gravity and present a new method to calculate the tunneling amplitude under the WKB approximation. The result agrees with the one obtained by the Euclidean path-integral…
We consider a single real scalar field in flat spacetime with a polynomial potential up to $\phi^4$, that has a local minimum, the false vacuum, and a deeper global minimum, the true vacuum. When the vacua are almost degenerate we are in…
We consider new instantons that appear as a result of accounting for quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations naturally regularize the O(4) singular solutions abandoned in Coleman's theory. In the previous works [3,4] we showed how new…
We present a general numerical method for computing precisely the false vacuum decay rate, including the prefactor due to quantum fluctuations about the classical bounce solution, in a self-interacting scalar field theory modeling the…
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,…
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 present a fully analytical calculation of the false vacuum decay rate for a self-interacting scalar field in the thin-wall approximation. We obtain the bounce solution, together with the Euclidean action, counter-terms and…
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 introduce a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum…
We study the dynamics of a cosmological bubble wall beyond the approximation of an infinitely thin wall. In a previous paper, we discussed the range of validity of this approximation and estimated the first-order corrections due to the…
We consider the decay of a false vacuum in circumstances where the methods suggested by Coleman run into difficulties. We find that in these cases quantum fluctuations play a crucial role. Namely, they naturally induce both an ultraviolet…
We study the problem of false vacuum decay in arbitrary dimensions, in the presence of gravity, and compute the transition probability within the thin-wall approximation, generalising the results of Coleman and de Luccia. In the particular…
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 $d>2$…
An Euclidean bounce describing vacuum decay can be considered as an infinite stack of concentric thin shells to which a thin-wall action can be assigned. The integral over all shells produces then a tunneling action that is precisely the…
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 behavior of the action of the instantons describing vacuum decay in a de Sitter is investigated. For a near-to-limit instanton (a Coleman-de Luccia instanton close to some Hawking-Moss instanton) we find approximate formulas for the…
The probability of destruction of a metastable vacuum state by the field of a highly virtual particle with energy $E$ is calculated for a (3+1) dimensional theory in the leading WKB approximation in the thin-wall limit. It is found that the…