Coleman-de Luccia reconsidered: a subtlety of gravity and the thin wall approximation

Abstract: I point out that the usual Coleman-de Luccia analysis of tunnelling via instantons between perturbatively stable minima using the thin-wall approximation misses one of the effects of gravitational backreaction on the on-shell action and hence the decay rate. Once this oversight is corrected, one finds these decay rates are much larger than has been generally appreciated; including the effects of gravity potentials involving barriers which are relatively high and not overly wide result in decays which are quite rapid instead of slow. In the light of these results, it is no longer clear that one should believe string theory predicts a wide class of cosmologically long-lived metastable de Sitter vacua.