Black hole induced false vacuum decay from first principles

Understand

We provide a method to calculate the rate of false vacuum decay induced by a black hole.

• The method uses complex tunneling solutions and consistently takes into account the structure of different quantum vacua in the black hole metric via boundary conditions.
• The latter are connected to the asymptotic behavior of the time-ordered Green's function in the corresponding vacua.
• We illustrate the technique on a two-dimensional toy model of a scalar field with inverted Liouville potential in an external background of a dilaton black hole.