Authors: Olga Czerwinska Zygmunt Lalak Marek Lewicki Pawel Olszewski
Publish Date: 2016/10/03
Volume: 2016, Issue: 10, Pages: 4-
Abstract
We consider vacuum decay in the presence of a nonminimal coupling to gravity We extend the usual thinwall solution to include the nonminimal coupling We also perform a full numerical study and discuss the validity of the new thinwall approximation Implications of a large cosmological constant whose influence on the geometry boosts the tunneling rate are discussed Our results show that the influence of the nonminimal coupling differs significantly between the cases of Minkowski and de Sitter backgrounds In the latter the decay probability quickly decreases when the coupling grows and in fact the vacuum can be made absolutely stable simply due to introduction of the nonminimal coupling In the case of Minkowski background the effect is much weaker and the decay rate even increases for small values of the nonminimal couplingThis article is published under an open access license Please check the Copyright Information section for details of this license and what reuse is permitted If your intended use exceeds what is permitted by the license or if you are unable to locate the licence and reuse information please contact the Rights and Permissions team
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