Vacuum decay in theories with symmetry breaking by radiative corrections

The standard bounce formalism for calculating the decay rate of a metastable vacuum cannot be applied to theories in which the symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections, because in such theories the tree-level action has no bounce solutions. In this paper I derive a modified formalism to deal with such cases. As in the usual case, the bubble nucleation rate may be written in the form Ae^-B. To leading approximation, B is the bounce action obtained by replacing the tree-level potential by the leading one-loop approximation to the effective potential, in agreement with the generally adopted ad hoc remedy. The next correction to B (which is proportional to an inverse power of a small coupling) is given in terms of the next-to-leading term in the effective potential and the leading correction to the two-derivative term in the effective action. The corrections beyond these (which may be included in the prefactor) do not have simple expressions in terms of the effective potential and the other functions in the effective action. In particular, the scalar-loop terms which give an imaginary part to the effective potential do not explicitly appear; the corresponding effects are included in a functional determinant which gives a manifestly real result for the nucleation rate.