Title:
“False vacuum decay: polygonal bounces and quartic prefactors”
Abstract:
We will discuss the physics of metastable transitions in quantum and thermal field theories. The presence of false vacua may trigger first order phase transitions that manifest themselves in cosmological observables, such as stochastic gravitational waves. I will discuss how the dominant semiclassical bounce contribution may be calculated exactly and how a universal semi-analytic method of polygonal bounces was developed and successfully implemented. Finally, I will focus on one loop corrections that involve summing up quantum fluctuations. I will show an exact one loop result for quartic potentials, which provides an analytic understanding of all the relevant features, including the bounce, removal of zeroes and renormalization.
Slides: