On thermal false vacuum decay around black holes [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08028


In flat space and at finite temperature, there are two regimes of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. At low temperature, the decay proceeds through thermally-assisted tunneling described by periodic Euclidean solutions — bounces — with non-trivial time dependence. On the other hand, at high temperature the bounces are time-independent and describe thermal jumps of the field over the potential barrier. We argue that only solutions of the second type are relevant for false vacuum decay catalyzed by a black hole in equilibrium with thermal bath. The argument applies to a wide class of spherical black holes, including $d$-dimensional AdS/dS-Schwarzschild black holes and Reissner-Nordstr\”om black holes sufficiently far from criticality. It does not rely on the thin-wall approximation and applies to multi-field scalar theories.

Read this paper on arXiv…

V. Briaud, A. Shkerin and S. Sibiryakov
Tue, 18 Oct 22
57/99

Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures