Vacuum Tunneling in an Electroweak Model in Extra Dimensions With an External Flux

Abstract

With the standard system for an SU(2) Higgs field in M_4 X S_1, the top and bottom component of the Higgs spinor have exactly the same coeficients for the quadratic and quadric terms. This makes the vacuum degenerate and thus there are no tunneling effects to zeroth order in radiative corrections of the vector gauge felds in the standard model with this extra dimensional geometry. However, if we include an external magnetic flux that permeates our manifold, then the top component of the Higgs spinor will have an additional term in its coefficient due to this theoretical flux with the usual charge assignments for the standard model. This extra term gives rise to two nondegenerate vacuum states for the resulting potential. We will compute the tunneling probability per unit time per unit volume between these vacuum states for the zero modes of our system as well as investigate the masses for the fields of the model using the false vacuum.