Tunneling in theories with many fields

Abstract

Abstract: The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting model of this phenomena consists of N scalars with a random potential of fourth order. Here we show that the scaling of the typical minimal bounce action with N is readily understood, and differs from statements in the literature. We discuss the extension to more realistic landscape models.