Vacuum decay in the presence of gravity

Abstract

In this paper, two mechanisms for vacuum decay in field theory are compared. First, using the Coleman-de Lucia method, the transition probability between two non-degenerate vacua is computed. Then this calculation is repeated according to the newly proposed yover method. For this purpose, a numerical simulation is used which solves Einstein's equation for a spherically symmetric metric and with a scalar field as a source. The obtained result shows the yover decay is dominant for a certain parametric range and it has a larger probability of upward transitions relative to CdL