A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actions--Institute of Theoretical Physics，Chinese Academy of Sciences

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A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actions

03/07 2023 Seminar

Title A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actions
Speaker Jose Ramon Espinosa (Madrid, IFT)
Date 16:00 Mar. 7, 2023
Venue Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88378049030?pwd=aVhsT24zcjU1R2ZNOC9jcktubXpRUT09 Meeting ID: 883 7804 9030 Passcode: 811418

Abstract

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 useful 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 interesting properties and applications that I will discuss.