Speaker
Description
First-order phase transitions can occur in the early universe depending on the structure of the Higgs sector. A crucial quantity for determining the cosmological consequences is the transition rate.
Recently, the tunneling potential method has been proposed as a new framework for computing transition rates, based on a positive-definite action formulation with O(4)-symmetry. This makes the relevant tunneling configuration easier to obtain.
In our work, we generalize this formulation to vacuum decay without assuming O(4)-symmetry. Going beyond O(4)-symmetry is essential for describing vacuum decay in localized or inhomogeneous backgrounds. This generalization opens the way to studying vacuum decay induced by impurities or solitons.
This talk is based on work in preparation with J. R. Espinosa, R. Jinno, T. Konstandin, and T. Miyachi.