Gauss-Bonnet Term on Vacuum Decay

We study the effect of the Gauss-Bonnet term on vacuum decay process in the Coleman-De Luccia formalism. The Gauss-Bonnet term has an exponential coupling with the real scalar field, which appears in the low energy effective action of string theories. We calculate numerically the instanton solution, which describes the process of vacuum decay, and obtain the critical size of bubble. We find that the Gauss-Bonnet term has a nontrivial effect on the false vacuum decay, depending on the Gauss-Bonnet coefficient.