Tunneling decay of false domain walls: the silence of the lambs

Abstract

We study the decay of "false" domain walls, which are metastable states of the quantum theory where the true vacuum is trapped inside the wall, with the false vacuum outside. We consider a theory with two scalar fields, a shepherd field and a field of sheep. The shepherd field serves to herd the solitons of the sheep field so that they are nicely bunched together. However, quantum tunnelling of the shepherd field releases the sheep to spread out uncontrollably. We show how to calculate the tunnelling amplitude for such a disintegration.

20 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Cosmic bubble and domain wall instabilities I: parametric amplification of linear fluctuations
• Tunneling decay of false kinks

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Head butting sheep: Kink Collisions in the Presence of False Vacua
• Solitary oscillations and multiple antikink-kink pairs in the double sine-Gordon model
• Vacuum Decay Induced by False Skyrmions
• Tunneling decay of false vortices with gravitation
• Chaotic instantons in scalar field theory