Self-consistent radiative corrections to false vacuum decay

5th Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries

Garbrecht, B.^1 ; Millington, P.^2

Physik Department T70, Technische Universität München, James-Franck-Straße, Garching

85748, Germany^1

School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham

NG7 2RD, United Kingdom^2

关键词: Classical potentials;    Electroweak vacuum;    One-loop corrections;    Quantum correction;    Quantum field theory;    Radiative corrections;    Radiative effects;    The standard model;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/873/1/012041/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/873/1/012041

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

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.