Tunnelling for Large N

TL;DR

This paper estimates the probability of tunneling between vacua in a multi-field landscape, showing that large numbers of fields can significantly increase tunneling likelihood and lead to rapid vacuum decay when reaching certain entropy thresholds.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic approach to analyze tunneling probabilities in multi-field landscapes and reveals how large N enhances decay rates.

Findings

Tunneling probability increases with the number of fields N.

Vacua become highly unstable when N reaches the de Sitter entropy limit.

Large N can lead to rapid decay of certain vacua.

Abstract

In this brief note, by applying the stochastic approach to multiple fields, we estimate the probability of tunneling between vacua in a landscape with $\cal N$ fields. We find that the probability can be enhanced by large $\cal N$. When $\cal N$ saturates the dS entropy of some vacuum, the corresponding vacuum will be extremely unstable and be expected to rapidly decay. We discuss the implications of this result.