Seeding decay of the false vacuum

Abstract

We present a theory of false vacuum decay induced by spherical nucleation seeds. The type of seed considered has a boundary characterised by surface energy terms. The theory applies to false vacuum decay at zero and finite temperatures. Seeded nucleation may be important for enabling future false vacuum decay experiments on analogue systems using Bose Einstein Condensates (BEC). We show that our theory of seeded nucleation at finite temperature applied to a potassium BEC in two spatial dimensions agrees with numerical, real-time, simulations.