The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple variational method using a tunneling potential to analyze vacuum decay in quantum field theory with gravity, revealing how gravity influences vacuum stability and decay rates.

Contribution

It presents a novel, straightforward approach to study gravitational effects on vacuum decay, applicable beyond traditional approximations and providing new insights into stability and decay mechanisms.

Findings

Gravitational corrections tend to stabilize Minkowski or Anti de Sitter vacua.

Higher potential barriers increase vacuum lifetime.

The method effectively analyzes near-critical vacuum decays beyond thin-wall approximation.

Abstract

A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in new and simple ways many results, among others, that gravitational corrections tend to make Minkowski or Anti de Sitter false vacua more stable semiclassically or that higher barriers increase vacuum lifetime. The approach also offers a very clean picture of gravitational quenching of vacuum decay and its parametric dependence on the features of a potential and allows to study the BPS domain-walls between vacua in critical cases. Special attention is devoted to supersymmetric potentials and to the discussion of near-critical vacuum decays, for which it is shown how the new method can be usefully applied beyond the thin-wall approximation.