Djuna Croon: Rethinking false vacuum decay

Thursday 3 Feb 2022, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

Future gravitational wave interferometers may provide the first direct probe of the first second of our Universe. A first order phase transition in the early Universe would have sourced a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). However, existing methods used to predict this SGWB are often plagued by large theoretical uncertainties. In this talk, I will take a step back and re-examine false vacuum decay rate calculations. I will motivate that some of these obstacles could be overcome through an alternate definition of the action which has a natural implementation in the functional renormalization group. I will demonstrate how the proposal works in a toy model example, and sketch a roadmap towards accurate gravitational phenomenology and other applications.