Hawking-Moss bounces and vacuum decay rates

Abstract

The conventional interpretation of the Hawking-Moss (HM) solution implies a transition rate between vacua that depends only on the values of the potential in the initial vacuum and at the top of a potential barrier, leading to the implausible conclusion that transitions to distant vacua can be as likely as those to a nearby one. I analyze this issue using a nongravitational example with analogous properties. I show that such HM bounce do not give reliable rate calculations, but are instead related to the probability of finding a quasistable configuration at a local potential maximum.

4 pages, 2 figures; title changed, clarifications in text, typos corrected, references added; version to appear in journal

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