Effect of gravity on false-vacuum decay rates for O(4)-symmetric bubble nucleation

Regulating Eternal Inflation II: The Great Divide

“…Instead we find that the space of potentials is partitioned by a Great Divide, into one class where Minkowski space is unstable, and a second class where the tunneling rate is indeed suppressed -as argued in [1] -by the factor e −π(RM P ) 2 (where R is the de Sitter radius corresponding to the false vacuum), and hence vanishes at V F = 0. The stability, for some potentials, of a seemingly metastable Minkowski vacuum was noted long ago by Coleman and De Luccia [2] in the thin-wall limit and subsequently discussed by several authors [3,4] outside of that limit.…”

False Vacuum Decay with Gravity in a Critical Case

“…In order to perform the numerical analysis of the instanton equations we will fix the parameter Z of the quartic potential to have the value corresponding to central point between the case when the false vacuum energy density V f v is negligible in comparison to V M (this situation corresponds to the thin-wall approximation considered in Coleman and de Luccia (1980) and is analyzed in part numerically in Samuel and Hiscock (1991)), and the case when the false vacuum disappears. Since the energy density in false vacuum is given by , 1995;Demetrian, 2004); at the value 4 the CdL instanton of the first order appears and at the value approximately 10 the second order CdL instantons appear (Balek and Demetrian, 2004;Demetrian, 2004).…”

Decay of de Sitter Vacua by Thermal Activation

“…[9,10,11] and references therein). The particular solution we shall consider here corresponds to pair creation of critical bubbles in de Sitter, and to our knowledge it does not seem to have received much attention in the past.…”