7–11 Dec 2020
Palais des Papes, Avignon
Europe/Paris timezone

A fresh look at the calculation of tunneling actions

9 Dec 2020, 09:00
30m
Chambre du Trésorier (Palais des Papes, Avignon)

Chambre du Trésorier

Palais des Papes, Avignon

Speaker

Prof. Jose Ramon Espinosa (IFT-UAM/CSIC)

Description

The calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential
suppression of the decay of metastable phases (like the unstable
electroweak vacuum), can be reformulated as an elementary variational
problem in field space. This alternative approach circumvents the use of
bounces in Euclidean space by introducing an auxiliary function, a
tunneling potential Vt that connects smoothly the metastable and stable
phases of the field potential V. The tunneling action is obtained as the
integral in field space of an action density that is a simple function
of Vt and V and can be considered as a generalization of the thin-wall
action to arbitrary potentials. This formalism provides new handles for
the theoretical understanding of different features of vacuum decay, can
be easily extended to include gravitational effects in an elegant way
and has a number of useful applications that I will discuss.

Primary author

Prof. Jose Ramon Espinosa (IFT-UAM/CSIC)

Presentation materials