2022/04/06 by José Eliel Camargo-Molina, Mariana Carrillo González, Camargo-Molina, José Eliel +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.03480
openalex publication_date 2022/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the decay rate of a false vacuum state in de Sitter space at high Hubble rates, using two methods: the Hawking-Moss instanton method which is fully quantum mechanical but relies on the saddle-point approximation, and the Starobinsky-Yokoyama stochastic approach which is non-perturbative but does not include quantum effects. We use the flux-over-population method to compute the Hawking-Moss decay rate at one-loop order, and demonstrate that in its domain of validity, it is reproduced by the stochastic calculation using the one-loop constraint effective potential. This suggests that the stochastic approach together with the constraint effective potential can be used to accurately describe vacuum decay beyond the saddle-point approximation.