Is our vacuum metastable?
@article{Turner1982IsOV, title={Is our vacuum metastable?}, author={Michael S. Turner and Frank Wilczek}, journal={Nature}, year={1982}, volume={298}, pages={633-634} }
In spontaneously broken gauge theories of particle interactions there are sometimes several local minima of the effective potential. Any of these minima can serve as a vacuum in the sense that we can expand the fields around their values at the minimum, interpret the quantized fluctuations around the minimum as particles, and compare the properties of these particles with experiment. One might think that only the state with absolutely minimum energy could be what we ordinarily call our vacuum…
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