An infrared bound on the ultraviolet bounce

TL;DR

The paper introduces pseudo-bounces as a method to estimate decay rates of metastable vacua in quantum field theories, including gravitational effects, without requiring knowledge of the true vacuum.

Contribution

It proves that pseudo-bounces form a family with decreasing decay exponents, providing a new way to bound decay rates even when the true vacuum is unknown.

Findings

Pseudo-bounces have a monotonically decreasing decay exponent.

The decay exponent's minimum is the true bounce action.

The method applies with gravitational effects included.

Abstract

Sometimes a local minimum is known to be a metastable vacuum inside the low-energy EFT, but the true vacuum lies outside, and the bounce solution mediating the decay cannot be found. For single-field decay, Espinosa has proposed a family of configurations called ``pseudo-bounces'' as a way to constrain the decay rate. They are parametrized by the central field value $\Phi_0$ and constructed without the knowledge of the true vacuum. We prove that the pseudo-bounce family has a monotonically decreasing decay exponent whose end point and minimum is the bounce action, and this continues to hold when gravitational effects are non-negligible. We then use this to estimate the decay rate (in the radion direction) of the promised AdS$_3$ vacuum of the Standard Model.