Thin and thick bubble walls III: wall energy

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the energy-momentum tensor of bubble walls with finite thickness, providing a systematic method to compute their energy contributions beyond the thin-wall approximation, supported by numerical comparisons.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to calculate the energy-momentum tensor of thick bubble walls, extending beyond the thin-wall approximation and validated by numerical results.

Findings

Systematic method for finite-thickness bubble wall energy-momentum tensor

Comparison between analytical approximations and numerical computations

Applicability to spherical bubble configurations

Abstract

We study the energy-momentum tensor of a bubble wall beyond the approximation of an infinitely thin wall. To this end, we discuss the proper decomposition into wall and bulk contributions, and we use a systematic method to calculate the energy-momentum tensor at any order in the wall width. We consider the specific examples of spherical bubbles with different initial configurations, and we compare our approximations with a numerical computation.