Bubbling the False Vacuum Away
Marcelo Gleiser, Barrett Rogers, Joel Thorarinson

TL;DR
This paper studies how bubble-like inhomogeneities, especially oscillons, significantly accelerate false vacuum decay in scalar field theories, shifting from exponential to power-law suppression.
Contribution
It demonstrates that large-amplitude bubble-like inhomogeneities promote resonant nucleation, a faster decay mechanism, and maps out the phase diagram of decay processes.
Findings
Large-amplitude inhomogeneities accelerate decay.
Resonant nucleation leads to power-law decay suppression.
Phase diagram distinguishes decay mechanisms.
Abstract
We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false-vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations of the field about the false vacuum as, for example, after a rapid quench or in certain models of cosmological inflation. We show that, for a wide range of parameters, the presence of large-amplitude bubble-like inhomogeneities greatly accelerates the decay rate, changing it from the well-known exponential suppression of homogeneous nucleation to a power-law suppression. It is argued that this fast, power-law vacuum decay -- known as resonant nucleation -- is promoted by the presence of long-lived oscillons among the nonperturbative fluctuations about the false vacuum. A phase diagram is obtained distinguishing three possible mechanisms for vacuum…
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