相关论文: A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actio…
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…
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…
We show that in Euclidean field theories that have bounce solutions, the bounce with the least action is the global minimum of the action in an open space of field configurations. A rigorous upper bound on the minimal bounce action can…
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…
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…
Recently, the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable vacua, has been reformulated as an elementary variational problem in field space. This paper extends this formalism to…
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…
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 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 $d>2$…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We review the description of tunnelling phenomena in the semi-classical approximation in ordinary quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In particular, we describe in detail the calculation, up to the first quantum corrections, of…
We describe a new method which allows one to evaluate the false vacuum decay rate for a general potential which may depend on an arbitrary number of scalar fields.
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…
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…
If the universe is trapped and cooled in a metastable false vacuum state, that state will eventually decay by bubble nucleation and expansion. For example, many extensions of the standard model incorporate new scalar fields whose potential…
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…
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…