Physics Commons^™

Bubbling The False Vacuum Away, M. Gleiser, B. Rogers, J. Thorarinson

Dartmouth Scholarship

We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of false- vacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations of the field about the false vacuum as, for example, after a rapid quench or in certain models of cosmological inflation. We show that, for a wide range of parameters, the presence of large-amplitude bubble-like inhomogeneities greatly accelerates the de- cay rate, changing it from the well-known exponential suppression of homogeneous nucleation to a power-law suppression. It is argued that this fast, power-law vacuum decay – known as …