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Equation 11 · Part 4 · The Vacuum Has a History: Symmetry Breaking as Speciation

Symbol e^-S_E

ΓV=A e−SE,\frac{\Gamma}{V} = A\,e^{-S_E},
e−SEe^{-S_E}

What this part means

e−e^-SES_E is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

Its job in the formula

e−e^-SES_E is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

The passage around this formula

If the electroweak vacuum is a local minimum rather than the global one, then in a quantum theory it is not perfectly stable; it can, in principle, decay by quantum tunneling to a lower-energy configuration, a possibility with no analogue in classical statistical mechanics. Coleman’s 1977 paper “Fate of the false vacuum” put the semiclassical machinery for this process on rigorous footing, treating decay as bubble nucleation: a small region of true vacuum appears through tunneling, and if the bubble is large enough that the volume energy released by the lower-energy interior outweighs the surface energy cost of the wall separating it from the surrounding false vacuum, the bubble expands,…

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Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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