Negative modes and decay-rate transition

Abstract

We investigate a relationship between the number of the negative modes around periodic instanton solution and the type of the decay-rate transition. It is shown that for the case of first-order decay-rate transition the lowest positive mode at low energy periodic instanton becomes additional negative mode at high energy regime, while in the second-order case there is only one negative mode in the full range of energy. This kind of analysis on the negative modes makes it possible to derive the criterion for the first-order transition.

13 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Periodic Instantons and Quantum-Classical Transitions in Spin Systems
• Decay of Metastable States: Sharp Transition from Quantum to Classical Behavior
• A condition for first order phase transitions in quantum mechanical tunneling models
• Periodic Instanton Bifurcations and Thermal Transition Rate
• Quantum Tunneling and Phase Transitions in Spin Systems with an Applied Magnetic Field
• Metastability of (d+n)-dimensional elastic manifolds
• Critical value of symmetry breaking parameter in the phase transition of decay rate

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Winding Number Transitions in the Mottola-Wipf Model on a Circle
• Hidden functional relation in Large-N Quark-Monopole system at finite temperature
• Winding number transitions at finite temperature in the Abelian-Higgs model
• Metastability Driven by Soft Quantum Fluctuation Modes
• Nucleation at finite temperature beyond the superminispace model
• Finite Temperature Theory of Metastable Anharmonic Potentials