Induced vacuum decay

Abstract

Consider the theory of a scalar field with a potential containing a relative minimum. The "false vacuum" built on this relative minimum is rendered unstable by quantum tunneling. The "spontaneous" decay amplitude has been calculated in the semiclassical approximation. There is an additional decay amplitude induced by the presence of particles and by their interactions. In this paper we compute the simplest "induced" decay amplitude, that caused by the mere presence of a particle. We show how to generalize our results to theories containing many fields of spin 0 and ½.