Quantum decay of domain walls in cosmology. I. Instanton approach

This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We introduce a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum fluctuates from one discrete state to another throughout one half of the universe, so that the wall decays into pure field energy. Equivalently, the fluctuation can be thought of as the nucleation of a second domain wall of zero size, followed by its growth by quantum tunnelling and its collision with the first wall, annihilating both. The barrier factor for this quantum tunneling is calculated by guessing and verifying a Euclidean instanton for the two-wall system. We also discuss the classical origin and evolution of closed, topologically spherical domain walls in the early universe, through a “budding-off” process involving closed domain walls larger than the Hubble radius. This paper is the first of a series on this subject.