Joint cosmology seminar at MIT:

Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 2:30 pm
Cosman Seminar Room\\
Center for Theoretical Physics\\
Building 6C, Room 6C-442\\
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Tunneling Potential

Jose Espinosa
Instituto de Fisica Teorica, Madrid

Abstract:

The Tunneling Potential formalism offers an alternative to the Euclidean bounce approach for calculating tunneling actions, which govern the exponential suppression of metastable vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this talk, after introducing the new formalism, I will discuss some general appealing properties of the approach and present two applications: to pseudo-bounce decays and to bubbles of nothing. Along the way I will highlight cases where the formalism delivers over expectations.