Metastable Vacua in Brane Worlds

Understand

We analyze vacuum decay in brane world setups, where a free scalar field in five dimensions has a localized potential admitting metastable vacua.

• We study in particular the bounce solution and its properties in flat and warped spaces.
• In the latter case, placing into a deeply warped region the term in the potential that lifts the vacuum degeneracy, can increase indefinitely the lifetime of the false vacuum.
• We discuss the application to metastable vacua in supersymmetric brane-world constructions.