Quantitative Analysis of the Stochastic Approach to Quantum Tunneling

Understand

Recently there has been increasing interest in alternate methods to compute quantum tunneling in field theory.

• Of particular interest is a stochastic approach which involves (i) sampling from the free theory Gaussian approximation to the Wigner distribution in order to obtain stochastic initial conditions for the field and momentum conjugate, then (ii) evolving under the classical field equations of motion, which leads to random bubble formation.
• Previous work showed parametric agreement between the logarithm of the tunneling rate in this stochastic approach and the usual instanton approximation.
• However, recent work [1] claimed excellent agreement between these methods.