Vacuum Decay Induced by False Skyrmions
High Energy Physics - Theory
2019-02-06 v3 Other Condensed Matter
Nuclear Theory
Abstract
We consider the Skyrme model modified by the addition of mass terms which explicitly break chiral symmetry and pick out a specific point on the model's target space as the unique true vacuum. However, they also allow the possibility of false vacua, local minima of the potential energy. These false vacuum configurations admit metastable skyrmions, which we call false skyrmions. False skyrmions can decay due to quantum tunnelling, consequently causing the decay of the false vacuum. We compute the rate of decay of the false vacuum due to the existence of false skyrmions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1805.08038,
title = {Vacuum Decay Induced by False Skyrmions},
author = {Éric Dupuis and Mareike Haberichter and Richard MacKenzie and M. B. Paranjape and U. A. Yajnik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.08038},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
12 pages, 11 figures