Abstract
An alternative approach to the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential suppression of the decay of metastable phases, is presented. The new method circumvents the use of bounces in Euclidean space by introducing an auxiliary function, a tunneling potential Vt that connects smoothly the metastable and stable phases of the field potential V. The tunneling action is obtained as the integral in field space of an action density that is a simple function of Vt and V. This compact expression can be considered as a generalization of the thin-wall action to arbitrary potentials and allows a fast numerical evaluation with a precision below the percent level for typical potentials. The method can also be used to generate potentials with analytic tunneling solutions.