Tunneling in Theories with Many Fields

Abstract

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 model of this phenomena consists of $N$ scalars with a random potential of fourth order. Here we show that the scaling of the typical minimal bounce action with $N$ is readily understood, and differs from statements in the literature. We discuss the extension to more realistic landscape models.

15 pages References added, some typos fixed

References in corpus (6)

• Large Deviations of Extreme Eigenvalues of Random Matrices
• Statistical analysis of the supersymmetry breaking scale
• Tumbling through a landscape: Evidence of instabilities in high-dimensional moduli spaces
• A Renormalization Group Approach to the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Cascades and Collapses, Great Walls and Forbidden Cities: Infinite Towers of Metastable Vacua in Supersymmetric Field Theories
• Naturalness and the Landscape

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Random Field Theories in The Mirror Quintic Moduli Space