The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple
arXiv:2005.09548 · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2020/07/061
Abstract
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in new and simple ways many results, among others, that gravitational corrections tend to make Minkowski or Anti de Sitter false vacua more stable semiclassically or that higher barriers increase vacuum lifetime. The approach also offers a very clean picture of gravitational quenching of vacuum decay and its parametric dependence on the features of a potential and allows to study the BPS domain-walls between vacua in critical cases. Special attention is devoted to supersymmetric potentials and to the discussion of near-critical vacuum decays, for which it is shown how the new method can be usefully applied beyond the thin-wall approximation.
27 pages, LaTeX
References in corpus (14)
- The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as the Weakest Force
- Static Domain Walls in N=1 Supergravity
- Domain walls, near-BPS bubbles, and probabilities in the landscape
- Nonperturbative Stability of Supergravity and Superstring Vacua
- A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actions
- Probabilities in the landscape: The decay of nearly flat space
- A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actions in Multi-Field Potentials
- Regulating Eternal Inflation II: The Great Divide
- A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actions including Gravitational Effects
- The Thin-Wall Approximation in Vacuum Decay: a Lemma
- Tunneling from a Minkowski vacuum to an AdS vacuum: A new thin-wall regime
- Vacuum Decay in the Standard Model: Analytical Results with Running and Gravity
- Consistency of Scalar Potentials from Quantum de Sitter Space
- Generalized surface tension bounds in vacuum decay
Cited by in corpus (6)
- Exactly Solvable Vacuum Decays with Gravity
- Pseudo-Bounces vs. New Instantons
- Vacuum Decay Actions from Tunneling Potentials for General Spacetime Dimension
- Quintessence and false vacuum: Two sides of the same coin?
- At the End of the World: Local Dynamical Cobordism
- Fate of false vacuum in non-perturbative regimes: Gravity effects