Real-Time Corrections to the Effective Potential

Understand

Non-perturbatively generated effective potentials play an extremely useful and often critical role in string and inflationary model building.

• These potentials are typically computed by methods that assume the system is in equilibrium.
• For systems out of equilibrium, like an inflaton rolling down its potential, there are corrections to the semi-classical evolution due to transient phenomena.
• We provide a new qualitative and quantitative understanding of non-perturbative effects in real time for a wide class of toy quantum mechanical models.