Seeding the decay of the false vacuum

We present a theory of false vacuum decay induced by spherical nucleation seeds. The type of seed considered has a boundary characterized by surface energy terms. The theory applies to false vacuum decay at zero and finite temperatures. Seeded nucleation may be important for enabling future false vacuum decay experiments on analog systems using Bose Einstein condensates (BEC). We show that our theory of seeded nucleation at finite temperature applied to a potassium BEC in two spatial dimensions agrees with numerical, real-time, simulations. Published by the American Physical Society 2024