Quantum tunneling from perturbation theory revisited

Abstract

In the late 1990s, Suzuki and Yasuta proposed a compact formula that extracts the decay rate per unit volume of a false vacuum in the $D$-dimensional $O(N)$ $\lambda(\phi^2)^2$ theory with an unbounded potential from conventional perturbative coefficients of the vacuum energy density, i.e., vacuum bubble diagrams. The idea was to identify the imaginary part arising from the Borel integral along the discontinuity of the Borel transform with that of the vacuum energy density. While the formula works quite well for~$D=1$, i.e., quantum mechanics, its validity remained unclear for~$D\geq2$ because only the first three perturbative coefficients for~$D=2$ were available and the result showed no sign of convergence. In the present paper, we reexamine this approach using the first seven nontrivial perturbative coefficients (up to nine loops) for~$D=2$ and~$N=1$ obtained by Serone, Spada, and~Villadoro. Introducing two tunable parameters in the finite-order truncated Borel transform following these authors, we find that the imaginary part converges as the perturbative order increases, with the last few orders agreeing to within a few percent. In the intermediate range of the coupling constant, $3\lesssim\widetilde{g}\lesssim8$, this approach yields an imaginary part rather close to the leading-order semi-classical approximation with the one-loop determinant; it is $10$--$20\%$ larger than the semi-classical result with the two-loop correction computed by Malatesta, Parisi, and~Rizzo.