Related papers: A Unified View of Vacuum Decay Channels
The catastrophic decay of a spacetime with compact dimensions, via bubbles of nothing (BoNs), is probably a generic phenomenon. BoNs admit a 4-dimensional description as singular Coleman-de Luccia bounces of the size modulus field,…
The Tunneling Potential Formalism was introduced to calculate the tunneling actions that control vacuum decay as an alternative to the standard Euclidean Formalism. The new approach sets the problem as a simple variational problem in field…
Bubbles of nothing (BoNs) describe the decay of spacetimes with compact dimensions and are thus of fundamental importance for many higher dimensional theories proposed beyond the Standard Model. BoNs admit a 4-dimensional description in…
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…
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 revisit the formalism for tunneling in quantum field theory developed by Coleman and collaborators. In particular using the generalization of WKB methods for tunneling in quantum mechanics we avoid the problems with negative eigenvalues…
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…
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…
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.…
Using a new approach to the analysis of false vacuum decay based on the so-called tunneling potential, we develop a general method to find scalar potentials with a false vacuum with exactly solvable decay at the semi-classical level,…
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.
We revisit the famous Coleman-de Luccia formalism for decay of false vacuum in gravitational theory. Since the corresponding wave function is time-independent we argue that its instanton's interpretation as the decay rate probability is…
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…
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,…
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…
The Euclidean bounce for vacuum decay enjoys an $O(4)$ symmetry that is lost in the presence of impurities than can catalyze the decay. We present a formulation for the calculation of the tunneling decay action, that is explicitly positive…
The Coleman formula for vacuum decay and bubble nucleation has been used to estimate the tunneling rate in models of axion monodromy in recent literature. However, several of Coleman's original assumptions do not hold for such models. Here…
This paper presents a simple framework that organizes thin-wall Coleman-De Luccia instantons based on the Euclidean geometries of their original and tunneled vacuum patches. We consider all a priori allowed vacuum pairs (de Sitter or…
Q-balls are bound-state configurations of complex scalars stabilized by a conserved Noether charge Q. They are solutions to a second-order differential equation that is structurally identical to Euclidean vacuum-decay bounce solutions in…
The tunneling Hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wavefunctions. Here we apply a generalization of the way we formed appropriate wave…