Exact tunneling solutions in multi-field potentials

Abstract

The tunneling potential formalism makes it easy to construct exact solutions to the vacuum decay problem in potentials with multiple fields. While some exact solutions for single-field decays were known, we present the first nontrivial analytic examples with two and three scalar fields, and show how the method can be generalized to include gravitational corrections. Our results illuminate some analytic properties of the tunneling potential functions and can have a number of uses, among others: to serve as simple approximations to realistic potentials; to learn about parametric dependencies of decay rates; to check conjectures on vacuum decay; as benchmarks for multi-field numerical codes; or to study holographic interpretations of vacuum decay.