On gravitational and thermal corrections to vacuum decay

Abstract

We reconsider gravitational corrections to vacuum decay, confirming and simplifying earlier results and extending them by allowing for a non-minimal coupling of the Higgs to gravity. We find that leading-order gravitational corrections suppress the vacuum decay rate. Furthermore, we compute minor corrections to thermal vacuum decay in the SM by adding one-loop contributions to the Higgs kinetic term, two-loop contributions to the Higgs potential and allowing for time-dependent bounces.

Comments: 19 pages, 7 figures