Particle decay in false vacuum

Abstract

We revisit the problem of decay of a metastable vacuum induced by the presence of a particle. For the bosons of the `master field' the problem is solved in any number of dimensions in terms of the spontaneous decay rate of the false vacuum, while for a fermion we find a closed expression for the decay rate in (1+1) dimensions. It is shown that in the (1+1) dimensional case an infrared problem of one-loop correction to the decay rate of a boson is resolved due to a cancellation between soft modes of the field. We also find the boson decay rate in the `sine-Gordon staircase' model in the limits of strong and weak coupling.

19 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Nucleation Rates in Flat and Curved Space
• Schwinger type processes via branes and their gravity duals
• Analytical Calculation of the Nucleation Rate for First Order Phase Transitions beyond the Thin Wall Approximation
• Catalyzed decay of false vacuum in four dimensions
• $k$ Strings from Various Perspectives: QCD, Lattices, String Theory and Toy Models
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• Monopole Decay in a Variable External Field
• Non-Perturbative Decay of a Monopole: the Semiclassical Pre-Exponential Factor
• Semiclassical calculation of an induced decay of false vacuum
• Photon-photon interaction and Schwinger process
• Semiclassical treatment of pair creation in de Sitter space