Recovering the negative mode for type B Coleman–de Luccia instantons

Abstract

The usual (type A) thin-wall Coleman-de Luccia instanton is made by a bigger-than-half sphere of the false vacuum and a smaller-than-half sphere of the true vacuum. It has a the standard O(4) symmetric negative mode associated with changing the size of false vacuum region. On the other hand, the type B instanton, made by two smaller-than-half spheres, was believed to have lost this negative mode. We argue that such belief is misguided due to an over-restriction on Euclidean path integral. We introduce the idea of a "purely geometric junction" to visualize why such restriction could be removed, and then explicitly construct this negative mode. We also show that type B and type A instantons have the same thermal interpretation for mediating tunnelings.