Self-consistent radiative corrections to false vacuum decay

Garbrecht, Bj�rn; Millington, Peter

Abstract

With the Higgs mass now measured at the sub-percent level, the potential metastability of the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model (SM) motivates renewed study of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this note, we describe an approach to calculating quantum corrections to the decay rate of false vacua that is able to account fully and self-consistently for the underlying inhomogeneity of the solitonic tunneling configuration. We show that this method can be applied both to theories in which the instability arises already at the level of the classical potential and those in which the instability arises entirely through radiative effects, as is the case for the SM Higgs vacuum. We analyse two simple models in the thin-wall regime, and we show that the modifications of the one-loop corrections from accounting fully for the inhomogeneity can compete at the same level as the two-loop homogeneous corrections.

Citation

Garbrecht, B., & Millington, P. (in press). Self-consistent radiative corrections to false vacuum decay. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 873, Article 012041. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/873/1/012041

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Conference Name: Fifth Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries
• Acceptance Date: Jul 3, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Jul 27, 2017
• Deposit Date: Nov 2, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 2, 2017
• Journal: Journal of Physics: Conference Series
• Print ISSN: 1742-6588
• Electronic ISSN: 1742-6596
• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 873
• Article Number: 012041
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/873/1/012041
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/874217
• Publisher URL: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/873/1/012041/meta
• Additional Information: Fifth Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries, Warsaw, Poland, 28 November-3 December 2016.
• Contract Date: Nov 2, 2017