Real-Time Instantons and Suppression of Collision-Induced Tunneling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semiclassical method to estimate the probability of collision-induced tunneling in quantum field theory at high energies, demonstrated through a (1+1)-dimensional scalar model.

Contribution

It presents a novel semiclassical approach for calculating high-energy collision-induced tunneling probabilities in quantum field theory.

Findings

Derived a method for estimating tunneling probabilities at high energies.

Applied the method to a (1+1)-dimensional scalar model with boundary interaction.

Identified the maximum probability of induced tunneling between different vacua.

Abstract

We consider tunneling processes in QFT induced by collisions of elementary particles. We propose a semiclassical method for estimating the probability of these processes in the limit of very high collision energy. As an illustration, we evaluate the maximum probability of induced tunneling between different vacua in a (1+1)-dimensional scalar model with boundary interaction.