Seminar by Miha Nemevšek

False Vacuua, Thick Walls and the Standard Model Lifetime

Many physical systems may possess metastable local minima, or false vacua. These can decay into the global ground state via quantum or thermal fluctuations. I shall discuss recent progress in computing such decay rates in generic theories in the thin and thick wall limits. Then I shall present an update in the calculation of the Standard Model lifetime, where we corrected the counting of transverse gauge degrees of freedom.