Vacuum Stability of the Wrong Sign (−ϕ 6) Scalar Field Theory

Abstract

We apply the effective potential method to study the vacuum stability of the bounded from above (−ϕ 6) (unstable) quantum field potential. The stability (∂E/∂b = 0) and the mass renormalization (∂ 2 E/∂b 2 = M 2) conditions force the effective potential of this theory to be bounded from below (stable). Since bounded from below potentials are always associated with localized wave functions, the algorithm we use replaces the boundary condition applied to the wave functions in the complex contour method by two stability conditions on the effective potential obtained. To test the validity of our calculations, we show that our variational predictions can reproduce exactly the results in the literature for the \(\mathcal {PT}\)-symmetric ϕ 4 theory. We then extend the applications of the algorithm to the unstudied stability problem of the bounded from above (−ϕ 6) scalar field theory where classical analysis prohibits the existence of a stable spectrum. Concerning this, we calculated the effective potential up to first order in the couplings in d space-time dimensions. We find that a Hermitian effective theory is instable while a non-Hermitian but \(\mathcal {PT}\)-symmetric effective theory characterized by a pure imaginary vacuum condensate is stable (bounded from below) which is against the classical predictions of the instability of the theory. We assert that the work presented here represents the first calculations that advocates the stability of the (−ϕ 6) scalar potential.