Department

Data Science

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Journal of High Energy Physics

ISSN

1029-8479

Volume

5

Issue

1

DOI

10.1007/JHEP05(2020)096

First Page

1

Last Page

14

Publication Date

1-1-1995

Abstract

Non-perturbatively generated effective potentials play an extremely useful and often critical role in string and inflationary model building. These potentials are typically computed by methods that assume the system is in equilibrium. For systems out of equilibrium, like an inflaton rolling down its potential, there are corrections to the semi-classical evolution due to transient phenomena. We provide a new qualitative and quantitative understanding of non-perturbative effects in real time for a wide class of toy quantum mechanical models. We derive an effective Schrödinger equation that does not rely on any notion of equilibrium and captures the low-energy dynamics supposedly described by the effective potential. We find that there are potentially large corrections to this potential that are not captured by standard equilibrium techniques, and quantify when these corrections significantly alter the effective dynamics.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Included in

Physics Commons

Share

COinS