False vacuum decay catalyzed by black hole in a heat bath

A bstract We study false vacuum decay catalyzed by black holes. We consider a scalar field model with unstable potential in the background of a dilaton black hole in two dimensions. The model reproduces many features of the Schwarzschild black hole background in four dimensions, including the centrifugal barrier for linearized field perturbations. Specifically, we study decays from the non-equilibrium state describing the evaporating black hole immersed in a thermal bath with a different temperature. We analytically construct the tunneling solution relevant at small field excitations and evaluate the decay suppression. We show how they reduce to those for the Hartle-Hawking (equilibrium) and Unruh states in the corresponding limits. For large field excitations the decay proceeds via stochastic activation; we find the relevant non-thermal sphaleron configuration in a certain region of parameters of the model and construct the semiclassical solution describing tunneling onto this sphaleron. Our results provide insights into the vacuum decay induced by small primordial black holes in the radiation-dominated era of the universe.