Breaking of a metastable string at finite temperature
Abstract
We consider the phase transition of a string with tension 1 to a string with a smaller tension 2 at finite temperature. For sufficiently small temperatures the transition proceeds through thermally catalyzed quantum tunneling, and we calculate in arbitrary number of dimensions the thermal catalysis factor. 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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