Fate of the false monopoles: Induced vacuum decay

Abstract

We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a metastable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub false monopoles. We prove the existence of these monopoles in the thin wall approximation. We determine the instantons for the collective coordinate that corresponds to the radius of the monopole wall and we calculate the semi-classical tunneling rate for the decay of these monopoles. The monopole decay consequently triggers the decay of the false vacuum. As the monopole mass is increased, we find an enhanced rate of decay of the false vacuum relative to the celebrated homogeneous tunneling rate due to Coleman [1].

Tunneling decay of false domain walls: The silence of the lambs

“…It may well be that the thin wall monopole suggested in [8] in fact only occurs for large monopole charge as has been found in several large charged BPS monopoles [9].…”

Tunneling decay of false vortices with gravitation

“…Different topological solitons such as metastable monopoles [17] and domain walls [30,31] were also studied in similar models with flat spacetime. Obtaining a generalization in curved spacetime for these defects would also be interesting.…”

“…The value of ǫ determines the shape of the potential [7,17]. The curvature scalar has mass dimension 2, 1/κ has mass dimension 1, the fields A µ and φ, the charge all have mass dimension 1/2, while the constants λ and ǫ are dimensionless parameters.…”

“…After getting the equation with the effective potential, we will return to the original coordinate system. The outside geometry takes the form 17) and the inside geometry takes the form…”

Baryon as impurity for phase transition in string landscape

“…The evolution of the universe (or multiverse) may be affected by their existence in that the catalysts accelerate transitions between vacua. In fact, it has been discussed in field theories that a semi-classical vacuum decay occurs from monopoles or cosmic strings [1][2][3][4] and applied to phenomenological studies of metastable vacua [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Moreover, recent developments of string theory compactifications suggest the existence of the landscape of vacua [12][13][14][15].…”