Tunneling from a Minkowski vacuum to an AdS vacuum: A new thin-wall regime

Abstract

Using numerical and analytic methods, we study quantum tunneling from a Minkowski false vacuum to an anti-de Sitter true vacuum. Scanning the parameter space of theories with quartic and non-polynomial potentials, we find that for any given potential tunneling is completely quenched if gravitational effects are made sufficiently strong. For potentials where $\epsilon$, the energy density difference between the vacua, is small compared to the barrier height, this occurs in the thin-wall regime studied by Coleman and De Luccia. However, we find that other potentials, possibly with $\epsilon$ much greater than the barrier height, produce a new type of thin-wall bounce when gravitational effects become strong. We show that the critical curve that bounds the region in parameter space where the false vacuum is stable can be found by a computationally simple overshoot/undershoot argument. We discuss the treatment of boundary terms in the bounce calculation and show that, with proper regularization, one obtains an identical finite result for the tunneling exponent regardless of whether or not these are included. Finally, we briefly discuss the extension of our results to transitions between anti-de Sitter vacua.

29 pages, 13 figures; added discussion, figures, and references

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• Domain walls, near-BPS bubbles, and probabilities in the landscape
• Heretics of the False Vacuum: Gravitational Effects On and Of Vacuum Decay 2
• Probabilities in the landscape: The decay of nearly flat space
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• The Thin-Wall Approximation in Vacuum Decay: a Lemma
• Impact of New Physics on the EW vacuum stability in a curved spacetime background
• Standard Model vacuum decay in a de Sitter Background
• The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple
• Domain walls in Horndeski gravity
• Criteria of existence for bounce solutions in false vacuum decay with gravity
• Generalized surface tension bounds in vacuum decay
• The Ambiguity in the Definition and Behavior of the Gravitational and Cosmological `Coupling Constants' in the Theory of Induced Gravity
• The tunneling decay rate in QFT beyond the thin wall approximation
• Non-minimally coupled gravity and vacuum stability