Exact Tunneling Solutions in Minkowski Spacetime and a Candidate for Dark Energy

TL;DR

This paper derives exact tunneling solutions in scalar field theory with specific potentials and explores their implications as potential dark energy candidates through analytical continuation and stress-energy analysis.

Contribution

It provides new exact solutions for tunneling in scalar fields with linear and quadratic potentials and investigates their role as dark energy.

Findings

Scalar field profiles inside bubbles are non-trivial.

Generated stress-energy tensors can mimic dark energy.

Solutions depend on the potential's form.

Abstract

We study exact tunneling solutions in scalar field theory for potential barriers composed of linear or quadratic patches. We analytically continue our solutions to imaginary Euclidean radius in order to study the profile of the scalar field inside the growing bubble. We find that generally there is a non-trivial profile of the scalar field, generating a stress-energy tensor, that depending on the form of the potential, can be a candidate for dark energy.