Decoherence delays false vacuum decay

Abstract

We show that gravitational interactions between massless thermal modes and a nucleating Coleman-de Luccia bubble may lead to efficient decoherence and strongly suppress metastable vacuum decay for bubbles that are small compared to the Hubble radius. The vacuum decay rate including gravity and thermal photon interactions has the exponential scaling $\Gamma \sim {\Gamma }_{CDL}^2$, where ${\Gamma }_{CDL}$ is the Coleman-de Luccia decay rate neglecting photon interactions. For the lowest metastable initial state an efficient quantum Zeno effect occurs due to thermal radiation of temperatures as low as the de Sitter temperature. This strong decoherence effect is a consequence of gravitational interactions with light external mode. We argue that efficient decoherence does not occur for the case of Hawking-Moss decay. This observation is consistent with requirements set by Poincare recurrence in de Sitter space.

arXiv comment19 pages, two figures, updated to published version

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• de Sitter Vacua in String Theory
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Observing the fate of the false vacuum with a quantum laboratory
• Cosmological Decoherence from Thermal Gravitons