The spontaneous breaking of a metastable string
Abstract
We consider the phase transition of a string with tension 1 to a string with a smaller tension 2. The transition proceeds through quantum tunneling, and we calculate in arbitrary number of dimensions the pre-exponential factor multiplying the leading semiclassical exponential expression for the rate of the process. At 2=0 the found formula for the decay rate also describes a break up of a metastable string into two pieces.
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