| Issue |
EPL
Volume 116, Number 2, October 2016
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 21001 | |
| Number of page(s) | 5 | |
| Section | The Physics of Elementary Particles and Fields | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/116/21001 | |
| Published online | 18 November 2016 | |
Impact of gravity on vacuum stability
1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Catania - Via Santa Sofia 64, 95123 Catania, Italy
2 INFN, Sezione di Catania - Via Santa Sofia 64, 95123 Catania, Italy
Received: 13 September 2016
Accepted: 3 November 2016
In a pioneering paper on the role of gravity on false vacuum decay, Coleman and De Luccia showed that a strong gravitational field can stabilize the false vacuum, suppressing the formation of true vacuum bubbles. This result is obtained for the case in which the energy density difference between the two vacua is small, the so-called thin-wall regime, but is considered of more general validity. Here we show that when this condition does not hold, however, the effect of gravity on the bubble nucleation rate amounts to a small correction to the flat space-time result even in a strong gravity regime. This result suggests that the impact of gravity on the stability analysis of the electroweak vacuum could be essentially negligible.
PACS: 14.80.Bn – Standard-model Higgs bosons / 11.27.+d – Extended classical solutions; cosmic strings, domain walls, texture / 04.62.+v – Quantum fields in curved spacetime
© EPLA, 2016
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