# Quantum Instabilities of Solitons

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum effects influence the stability of solitons in one-dimensional models, revealing potential instabilities when solitons connect vacua with different curvatures.

## Contribution

It introduces a method to compute vacuum polarization energies for solitons and proposes a conjecture about quantum-induced instabilities related to vacuum properties.

## Key findings

- Vacuum polarization energies can destabilize solitons.
- Instabilities occur when solitons connect vacua with different curvatures.
- The study provides a framework for analyzing quantum effects on soliton stability.

## Abstract

We compute the vacuum polarization energies for a couple of soliton models in one space and one time dimensions. These solitons are mappings that connect different degenerate vacua. From the considered sample solitons we conjecture that the vacuum polarization contribution to the total energy leads to instabilities whenever degenerate vacua with different curvatures in field space are accessible to the soliton.