Speaker
Description
In the standard picture, the decay of a false vacuum in a single-field potential is described by a semiclassical Euclidean bounce, but the decay landscape can be much richer. Sometimes no bounce exists and the decay proceeds via a different kind of field configurations, called pseudo-bounces. Some other potentials have more than one bounce, including antibounces, configurations with the “wrong” behavior for overshoot/undershoot algorithms that can miss them. After showing how all these different decay channels, bounces, pseudo-bounces, and antibounces, fit together I discuss the number of negative modes expected for the different solutions (to determine which ones are relevant for the decay) and present some conditions that potentials have to meet to feature more than one bounce.