Effective action for bubble nucleation rates

Abstract

We develop a method to calculate the prefactor in the expression for the bubble nucleation rate. A fermion with Yukawa coupling is considered where a step potential can be used as a good approximation in the thin wall limit. Corrections due to thicker walls are considered by perturbing about the thin wall case. We derive the thermal one loop effective action, calculating it numerically, and find that the prefactor in the nucleation rate can both suppress and enhance, for a given temperature, when the usual renormalisation conditions are applied to the effective potential.

16 pages, 3 figures, ReVTeX; Extended introduction and 2 new appendices to concur with the version to appear in Nuclear Physics B

References in corpus (4)

• Heat Kernel Expansion for Semitransparent Boundaries
• Analytical Calculation of the Nucleation Rate for First Order Phase Transitions beyond the Thin Wall Approximation
• Heat Kernel Expansions for Distributional Backgrounds
• Comparison of two methods for calculating nucleation rates

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