Self-consistent solitons for vacuum decay in radiatively generated potentials

Abstract

We use a Green's function approach in order to develop a method for calculating the tunneling rate between radiatively-generated non-degenerate vacua. We apply this to a model that exhibits spontaneous symmetry breaking via the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism, where we determine the self-consistent tunneling configuration and illustrate the impact of gradient effects that arise from accounting for the underlying space-time inhomogeneity.

14 pages, 14 figures, revtex format; version accepted for publication in Physical Review D