Thick Wall from Thin Walls

Abstract

An Euclidean bounce describing vacuum decay can be considered as an infinite stack of concentric thin shells to which a thin-wall action can be assigned. The integral over all shells produces then a tunneling action that is precisely the action functional in field space of the so-called tunneling potential formalism. This procedure, which works also when gravity is included, gives the simplest derivation of such actions.

9 pages