Validity of the kink approximation to the tunneling action

Alexander Westphal; Cecelie Hector; Koushik Dutta; Pascal M. Vaudrevange; Thomas Konstandin

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Validity of the kink approximation to the tunneling action

Koushik Dutta, Cecelie Hector, Thomas Konstandin, Pascal M. Vaudrevange, Alexander Westphal

High Energy Physics - Theory · Submitted 13 Feb 2012

abstract compiled · 2026-09-23 · no language-model review

The authors' main claim We discuss under which conditions a kink approximation of locally smooth 'cap' regions provides a good estimate for the bounce action.

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arXiv ID1202.2721 (version 2)

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CitationAlexander Westphal, Cecelie Hector, Koushik Dutta, Pascal M. Vaudrevange, Thomas Konstandin. "Validity of the kink approximation to the tunneling action." arXiv:1202.2721 (2012). https://pith.science/paper/EIYDL7QA

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Compiled by classifier-1.13-20260917 via OpenRouter, question bank abstract-p1-20260923, 2026-09-23: 1 request, 2,981 input tokens, $0.0001 reported.

What the abstract itself states, as probabilities: claims first 0.03 · states limitation 0.42 · human participants 0.01 · controlled comparison 0.06 · randomized assignment 0.01 · states quantitative result 0.05 · compares with prior results 0.45 · mentions code or data availability 0.02.

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Coleman tunneling in a general scalar potential with two non-degenerate minima is known to have an approximation in terms of a piecewise linear triangular-shaped potential with sharp 'kinks' at the place of the local minima. This approximate potential has a regime where the existence of the bounce solution needs the scalar field to 'wait' for some amount of Euclidean time at one of the 'kinks'. We discuss under which conditions a kink approximation of locally smooth 'cap' regions provides a good estimate for the bounce action.

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#	sentence	role	the authors' own work	states the main conclusion	strength
s0	Coleman tunneling in a general scalar potential with two non-degenerate minima is known to have an approximation in terms of a piecewise linear triangular-shaped potential with sharp 'kinks' at the place of the local minima.	background 1.00	0.04	0.05	asserted 1.00
s1	This approximate potential has a regime where the existence of the bounce solution needs the scalar field to 'wait' for some amount of Euclidean time at one of the 'kinks'.	background 0.98	0.11	0.05	asserted 0.99
s2	We discuss under which conditions a kink approximation of locally smooth 'cap' regions provides a good estimate for the bounce action.	contribution 1.00	0.76	0.16	unclear 0.84

What kind of paper the classifier reports this is: theoretical result 0.98 · evidence from proof or derivation 0.64.

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arXiv listing abstract v2

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The paper

Original abstract

Coleman tunneling in a general scalar potential with two non-degenerate minima is known to have an approximation in terms of a piecewise linear triangular-shaped potential with sharp 'kinks' at the place of the local minima. This approximate potential has a regime where the existence of the bounce solution needs the scalar field to 'wait' for some amount of Euclidean time at one of the 'kinks'. We discuss under which conditions a kink approximation of locally smooth 'cap' regions provides a good estimate for the bounce action.

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References

Forward citations

Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

Analytic bounces in d dimensions
hep-th 2020-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

Exact d-dimensional Euclidean bounce actions are derived for triangular, square, and quadratic false-vacuum decay potentials, and are shown to reduce to the thin-wall result.
FindBounce: package for multi-field bounce actions
hep-ph 2020-02 accept novelty 5.0 of 10

A released Mathematica package computes multi-field bounce actions in seconds by discretizing the potential into linear segments, benchmarked against exact solutions and four existing public tools.

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7 arXiv papers cite this in 7 sentences

Each citing sentence is taken from the citing paper's LaTeX source and typed by Pith's classifier. A label appears at probability 0.8 or more (0.95 for support), a contest at 0.7 or more; the quoted words are the citing authors'. How each label was checked · JSON

Papers citing it · 3 sentences without a confident label

Cites it as background 4 papers

This approximation was studied in [ref] for single field and [ref] for multi-field potentials.

Multifield Polygonal Bounces · Introduction · 0.82
Some simple polygonal potentials were proposed in Refs. [ref] .

Piecewise linear potentials for false vacuum decay and negative modes · Introduction · 0.93
Nonetheless, one can find exact solutions for specific potentials, including the Fubini-Lipatov instanton [ref] and its generalization [ref] , linear [ref] , polygonal [ref] , logarithmic [ref] , pure quartic [ref] and the quartic-quartic potential [ref] .

Exact one-loop false vacuum decay rate · Introduction · 0.87

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