TY - JOUR
T1 - Is the vacuum stable?
AU - Kusenko, Alexander
AU - Langacker, Paul
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the Aspen Center for Physics for its hospitality. This work was supported by the U.S. De-partmento f Energy Contract No. DE-AC02-76-ERO-3071.
PY - 1997/1/9
Y1 - 1997/1/9
N2 - The experimental data, as well as theoretical considerations allow (and, in some cases, require) the Universe at present to rest in a false vacuum, whose approximate stability imposes constraints on the model parameters. Under very general and mild conditions, the Universe would have ended up in the standard vacuum even if the potential has deeper minima, provided there was a period in which the temperature was ≳ 1 TeV. In many cases, the zero temperature tunneling rate is much smaller than the inverse age of the Universe. Future experiments may reveal that the physical vacuum is not entirely stable. Implications for the cosmological constant are discussed.
AB - The experimental data, as well as theoretical considerations allow (and, in some cases, require) the Universe at present to rest in a false vacuum, whose approximate stability imposes constraints on the model parameters. Under very general and mild conditions, the Universe would have ended up in the standard vacuum even if the potential has deeper minima, provided there was a period in which the temperature was ≳ 1 TeV. In many cases, the zero temperature tunneling rate is much smaller than the inverse age of the Universe. Future experiments may reveal that the physical vacuum is not entirely stable. Implications for the cosmological constant are discussed.
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U2 - 10.1016/S0370-2693(96)01470-0
DO - 10.1016/S0370-2693(96)01470-0
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0042214292
SN - 0370-2693
VL - 391
SP - 29
EP - 33
JO - Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics
JF - Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics
IS - 1-2
ER -