Abstract
We present a Python package BubbleDet for computing one-loop functional determinants around spherically symmetric background fields. This gives the next-to-leading order correction to both the vacuum decay rate, at zero temperature, and to the bubble nucleation rate in first-order phase transitions at finite temperature. For predictions of gravitational wave signals from cosmological phase transitions, this is expected to remove one of the leading sources of theoretical uncertainty. BubbleDet is applicable to arbitrary scalar potentials and in any dimension up to seven. It has methods for fluctuations of scalar fields, including Goldstone bosons, and for gauge fields, but is limited to cases where the determinant factorises into a product of separate determinants, one for each field degree of freedom. To our knowledge, BubbleDet is the first package dedicated to calculating functional determinants in spherically symmetric backgrounds.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Aleksandar Ivanov, Marco Matteini, Miha Nemevšek and Lorenzo Ubaldi for communication regarding the results of ref. [30]. O.G. would like to thank Lois Overvoorde for advice on software development. We acknowledge the support of the European Consortium for Astroparticle Theory in the form of an Exchange Travel Grant. The work of A.E. has been supported by the Swedish Research Council, project number VR:2021-00363 and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Germany’s Excellence Strategy - EXC 2121 Quantum Universe - 390833306. The work of O.G. has been supported by U.K. Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Consolidated grant ST/T000732/1, a Research Leadership Award from the Leverhulme Trust and a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship from the Royal Society.
Data Availability Statement. This work has no associated scientific data. The data for illustrative plots can be reproduced using version 1.0.0 of the associated open source Python package BubbleDet.
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Ekstedt, A., Gould, O. & Hirvonen, J. BubbleDet: a Python package to compute functional determinants for bubble nucleation. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 56 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2023)056
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2023)056