Vacuum Decay and Euclidean Lattice Monte Carlo

Abstract

The decay rate of a metastable vacuum is usually calculated using a semiclassical approximation to the Euclidean path integral. The extension to a complete Euclidean lattice Monte Carlo computation, however, is hampered by analytic continuations that are ill-suited to numerical treatment, and the nonequilibrium nature of a metastable state. In this paper we develop a new methodology to compute vacuum decay rates from Monte Carlo simulations of Euclidean lattice theories. To test the new method, we consider simple quantum mechanical systems systems with metastable vacua. This work can be extended to Euclidean field theories, which we discuss in the Conclusions.

33 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (16)

• Multicanonical Ensemble: A New Approach to Simulate First-order Phase Transitions
• Theta Dependence In The Large N Limit Of Four-Dimensional Gauge Theories
• Equivariant flow-based sampling for lattice gauge theory
• Sampling using $SU(N)$ gauge equivariant flows
• Precision decay rate calculations in quantum field theory
• Electroweak Bubble Nucleation, Nonperturbatively
• Beyond the thin-wall approximation : precise numerical computation of prefactors in false vacuum decay
• False vacuum decay in quantum spin chains
• Effective field theory approach to thermal bubble nucleation
• First-order electroweak phase transitions: a nonperturbative update
• Non-perturbative computation of the bubble nucleation rate in the cubic anisotropy model
• Exact one-loop false vacuum decay rate
• Lorentzian path integral for quantum tunneling and WKB approximation for wave-function
• Vacuum decay in the Lorentzian path integral
• Analytic thin wall false vacuum decay rate
• Schwinger effect and false vacuum decay as quantum-mechanical tunneling of a relativistic particle

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Cosmological phase transitions: from perturbative particle physics to gravitational waves
• Flow-based Nonperturbative Simulation of First-order Phase Transitions