Vacuum Decay Induced by Quantum Fluctuations

Understand

We treat the effects of quantum field fluctuations on the decay of a meta-stable state of a self-coupled scalar field.

• We consider two varieties of field fluctuations and their potential effects in a semiclassical description.
• The first are the fluctuations of the time derivative a free massive scalar field operator, which has been averaged over finite regions of space and time.
• These fluctuations obey a Gaussian probability distribution.