Negative modes and decay-rate transition

Abstract

We investigate a relationship between the number of the negative modes around periodic instanton solution and the type of the decay-rate transition. It is shown that for the case of first-order decay-rate transition the lowest positive mode at low energy periodic instanton becomes additional negative mode at high energy regime, while in the second-order case there is only one negative mode in the full range of energy. This kind of analysis on the negative modes makes it possible to derive the criterion for the first-order transition.