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arXiv · 2506.18334

False Vacuum Decay across the Quantum-to-Thermal Crossover: A Comparison of Real-Time Observables

Haiyang Wang·Renhui Qin·Ligong Bian
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Abstract

We develop a real-time Wigner-functional lattice framework with positive Hartree-Gaussian initial sampling and introduce a connected-cluster survival criterion for extracting false-vacuum decay rates across the crossover from quantum fluctuations to thermal nucleation. At high temperatures, the connected-cluster rate agrees well with the Hartree-resummed thermal nucleation benchmark, while the commonly used global-survival criterion can give substantially smaller rates because of multi-seed dynamics and global averaging. At low temperatures, the connected-cluster and global-survival rates approach each other in the dilute-event regime, whereas the false-vacuum fraction observable can be contaminated by transient spatial conversion and kink-antikink reflection. Our results clarify how different real-time observables encode distinct aspects of metastable decay.

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Haiyang Wang, Renhui Qin, Ligong Bian. 2025-06-23. False Vacuum Decay across the Quantum-to-Thermal Crossover: A Comparison of Real-Time Observables. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18334

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