Estimating Vacuum Tunneling Rates

Abstract

We show that in Euclidean field theories that have bounce solutions, the bounce with the least action is the global minimum of the action in an open space of field configurations. A rigorous upper bound on the minimal bounce action can therefore be obtained by finite numerical methods. This sets a lower bound on the tunneling rate which, fortunately, is often the more interesting and useful bound. We introduce a notion of reduction which allows this bound to be computed with less effort by reducing complicated field theories to simpler ones.