Parametrized Path Approach to Vacuum Decay

Understand

We develop a new real-time approach to vacuum decay based on a reduction to a finite number of degrees of freedom.

• The dynamics is followed by solving a generalized Schr\"odinger equation.
• We first apply this method to a real scalar field in Minkowski space and compare the decay rate with that obtained by the instanton approach.
• The main difference is in the early-time dynamics, where the decay is faster due to the tail of the wave function.