Tunneling in Axion Monodromy

 

Mr Jonathan Brown
University of Wisconsin-Madison

26 Aug 2016 (Friday)
3:30 pm
IAS4042, 4/F, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST

The Coleman formula for vacuum decay has been used in recent literature to estimate the tunneling rate in models of axion monodromy. However, several of the assumptions originally made by Coleman do not hold in such models. The speaker and his research group instead derive a new appropriately generalized estimate for the tunneling rate using a similar Euclidean procedure. They investigate this problem first in field theory and then generalize to the case which includes gravity. There are some regions of parameter space that disagree with the Coleman formula and some regions that agree parametrically. Implications for use of axion monodromy in large field inflation and the relaxion model will also be discussed in this talk.