Title: Generalized surface tension bounds in vacuum decay

Abstract

Coleman and De Luccia (CDL) showed that gravitational effects can prevent the decay by bubble nucleation of a Minkowski or AdS false vacuum. In their thin-wall approximation this happens whenever the surface tension in the bubble wall exceeds an upper bound proportional to the difference of the square roots of the true and false vacuum energy densities. Recently it was shown that there is another type of thin-wall regime that differs from that of CDL in that the radius of curvature grows substantially as one moves through the wall. Not only does the CDL derivation of the bound fail in this case, but also its very formulation becomes ambiguous because the surface tension is not well defined. We propose a definition of the surface tension and show that it obeys a bound similar in form to that of the CDL case. We then show that both thin-wall bounds are special cases of a more general bound that is satisfied for all bounce solutions with Minkowski or AdS false vacua. We discuss the limit where the parameters of the theory attain critical values and the bound is saturated. The bounce solution then disappears and a static planar domain wall solution appearsmore » in its stead. The scalar field potential then is of the form expected in supergravity, but this is only guaranteed along the trajectory in field space traced out by the bounce.« less

Authors:

Masoumi, Ali; Paban, Sonia; Weinberg, Erick J.

Publication Date:

Tue Feb 27 00:00:00 EST 2018

Research Org.:

Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE Office of Science (SC)

OSTI Identifier:

1422864

Alternate Identifier(s):

OSTI ID: 1503891

Grant/Contract Number:  

SC0011941

Resource Type:

Published Article

Journal Name:

Physical Review D

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Name: Physical Review D Journal Volume: 97 Journal Issue: 4; Journal ID: ISSN 2470-0010

Publisher:

American Physical Society

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS