VacuumTunneling: A package to solve bounce equation with renormalization factor

TL;DR

VacuumTunneling is a Mathematica package that accurately computes the bounce action for cosmological phase transitions, explicitly including the renormalization factor Z, which significantly affects tunneling calculations.

Contribution

The package introduces the inclusion of the renormalization factor Z in bounce action calculations, improving accuracy over existing tools and optimizing for super-cooling phase transitions.

Findings

Including Z significantly alters the tunneling action and path.

The package performs calculations rapidly, within seconds.

It handles numerical potentials without analytical expressions.

Abstract

The Vacuum tunneling rate $\Gamma$ from the effective action is a key to studying the cosmological first-order phase transition(FOPT). One solid way to compute the $\Gamma$ is to start with the derivative expansion of the effective action and solve the bounce equation numerically. In this process, the renormalization factor $Z$ of the tunneling field may play a center rule, which is not considered in existing packages. Therefore, we present a \texttt{Mathematica} package \vt to compute the bounce action with or without the renormalization factor. Applying the \vt package, we find that the presence of $Z$ has a significant impact on the action, as well on the tunneling path. We provide some concrete examples to demonstrate the difference between the solution with and without the renormalization factor, both in the action and tunneling path. This package is based on the modified shooting and path deformation method. We also made some optimizations for the super-cooling phase transition(thick wall scenario), in which other numerical package works poorly. This package works as long as the expressions can give values of the potential and the renormalization at a certain field point. This means the input potential and the renormalization can be merely numerical quantities without analytical expressions. The computation time can be as short as 1 second in single-field tunneling and several seconds in multi-field cases.