On thermal false vacuum decay around black holes

Abstract

In flat space and at finite temperature, there are two regimes of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. At low temperature, the decay proceeds through thermally-assisted tunneling described by periodic Euclidean solutions -- bounces -- with non-trivial time dependence. On the other hand, at high temperature the bounces are time-independent and describe thermal jumps of the field over the potential barrier. We argue that only solutions of the second type are relevant for false vacuum decay catalyzed by a black hole in equilibrium with thermal bath. The argument applies to a wide class of spherical black holes, including $d$-dimensional AdS/dS-Schwarzschild black holes and Reissner-Nordström black holes sufficiently far from criticality. It does not rely on the thin-wall approximation and applies to multi-field scalar theories.

7 pages, 2 figures. v2: references added; matches the published version

References in corpus (4)

• Thermal derivation of the Coleman-De Luccia tunneling prescription
• False Vacuum Decay Catalyzed by Black Holes
• Thin-shell bubbles and information loss problem in anti de Sitter background
• On catalyzed vacuum decay around a radiating black hole and the crisis of the electroweak vacuum

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• Testing Higher Derivative Gravity Through Tunnelling