Renormalization-scale uncertainty in the decay rate of false vacuum

Particle decay in false vacuum

We revisit the problem of decay of a metastable vacuum induced by the presence of a particle. For the bosons of the 'master field' the problem is solved in any number of dimensions in terms of the spontaneous decay rate of the false vacuum, while for a fermion we find a closed expression for the decay rate in (1+1) dimensions. It is shown that in the (1+1) dimensional case an infrared problem o...

False Vacuum Decay after Inflation

Inflation is terminated by a non-equilibrium process which finally leads to a thermal state. We study the onset of this transition in a class of hybrid inflation models. The exponential growth of tachyonic modes leads to decoherence and spinodal decomposition. We compute the decoherence time, the spinodal time, the size of the formed domains and the homogeneous classical fields within a single ...

False Vacuum Decay Induced by Particle Collisions

The semiclassical formalism for numerical calculation of the rate of tunneling transitions induced by N particles with total energy E of order or higher than the height of the barrier is developed. The formalism is applied to the induced false vacuum decay in the massive four-dimensional −λφ model. The decay rate, as a function of E and N , is calculated numerically in the range 0.4 ∼< E/Esph ∼...

Spontaneous and induced false vacuum decay

Catalyzed decay of a false vacuum in four dimensions.

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 induced nucleation rate of bubbles, capable of expansion, is exponentially small at any energy. The negative exponential power in the rate reaches its maximum...