The Boring Monopole

Understand

We study false vacuum decays catalysed by magnetic monopoles which act as tunnelling sites with exponentially enhanced decay rates.

• The field profiles describing the decay do not have the typically assumed $O(3)/O(4)$ symmetry, thus requiring an extension of the usual decay rate calculation.
• To numerically determine the saddle point solutions which describe the tunnelling process we use a new algorithm based on the mountain pass theorem.
• This method can be applied more widely to phase transitions with reduced symmetry, such as decays away from the zero and infinite temperature limits.