Hawking-Moss Tunneling with a Dirac-Born-Infeld Action

TL;DR

This paper calculates the Hawking-Moss tunneling rate for a field with a Dirac-Born-Infeld action, revealing that non-trivial kinetic terms significantly enhance tunneling rates, with implications for cosmological phase transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic approach to compute Hawking-Moss tunneling with DBI actions, highlighting the exponential enhancement due to kinetic terms.

Findings

Non-trivial kinetic terms enhance tunneling rates exponentially.

Comparison with Coleman-de Luccia case shows similar DBI effects.

Stochastic method effectively captures tunneling dynamics with DBI actions.

Abstract

The Hawking-Moss tunneling rate for a field described by the Dirac-Born-Infeld action is calculated using a stochastic approach. We find that the effect of the non-trivial kinetic term is to enhance the tunneling rate, which can be exponentially significant. This result should be compared to the DBI enhancement found in the Coleman-de Luccia case.