Related papers: Estimating Vacuum Tunneling Rates
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.…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
In his 1977 paper on vacuum decay in field theory: The Fate of the False Vacuum, Coleman considered the problem of a single scalar field and assumed that the minimum action tunnelling field configuration, the bounce, is invariant under O(4)…
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…
We study tunneling in one-dimensional quantum mechanics using the path integral in real time, where solutions of the classical equation of motion live in the complex plane. Analyzing solutions with small (complex) energy, relevant for…
We present a lower bound for the multi-field bounce action with a quartic potential in the absence of gravity. We find that for a large number of fields the lower bound decreases with the number of fields as N^{-3}. This work clarifies…
We study the Euclidean bounce action interpolating between a false and a true vacuum for a scalar field theory with various types of potential. We focus on the cases of a triangular, a square and a quadratic barrier, where the bounce action…
It is shown that, to the lowest order in $\hbar,$ the particle production related to the tunneling that leads to the false vacuum decay is described by the orthogonal part of fluctuation field with respect to the bounce solution. As a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…
In Euclidean space there is a trivial upper bound on the maximum length of a compound "walk" built up of variable-length jumps, and a considerably less trivial lower bound on its minimum length. The existence of this non-trivial lower bound…
Tunneling is a fascinating aspect of quantum mechanics that renders the local minima of a potential meta-stable, with important consequences for particle physics, for the early hot stage of the universe, and more speculatively, for the…
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…
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…