Thermal Decays in a Hot Fermi Gas

TL;DR

This paper investigates how metastable states in a scalar field decay through thermal activation, focusing on droplet nucleation in a one-dimensional boson-fermion system at finite temperature and chemical potential, with time-dependent decay rates.

Contribution

It introduces a non-equilibrium formalism to analyze thermal decay rates in a coupled boson-fermion system, providing new insights into metastable state decay processes.

Findings

Derived time-dependent decay rates for metastable states.

Analyzed the impact of finite temperature and chemical potential.

Provided a framework for studying decay in non-equilibrium conditions.

Abstract

We present a study of the decay of metastable states of a scalar field via thermal activation, in the presence of a finite density of fermions. The process we consider is the nucleation of ``{\it droplets}'' of true vacuum inside the false one. We analyze a one-dimensional system of interacting bosons and fermions, considering the latter at finite temperature and with a given chemical potential. As a consequence of a non-equilibrium formalism previously developed, we obtain time-dependent decay rates.