Surprises in Vacuum Decay or Bounces, Pseudo-Bounces and Antibounces

by Jose Ramon Espinosa Sedano (IFT-UAM/CSIC Madrid)

Wednesday 22 Apr 2026, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-011 - TH common room (CERN)

False vacuum decay in a single-field potential is described by a semiclassical Euclidean bounce, which can be found with overshoot/undershoot algorithms. Sometimes no such bounce exists and the decay proceeds through the so-called pseudo-bounces. I’ll use these to show that the landscape of vacuum decay channels can be much richer than just a single bounce solution. For instance, in steep potentials we can encounter antibounces, configurations with the “wrong” behavior for overshoot/undershoot algorithms, that can miss them. I’ll show how all these different decay channels (bounces, pseudo-bounces, and antibounces) fit together. 

This seminar will be a blackboard talk.