The Vacuum of Space Will Decay Sooner Than Expected

The archetypal version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Vacuum decay, a process that could extremity the beingness arsenic we cognize it, whitethorn hap 10,000 times sooner than expected. Fortunately, it inactive won’t hap for a very, precise agelong time.

When physicists talk of “the vacuum,” the word sounds arsenic though it refers to bare space, and successful a consciousness it does. More specifically, it refers to a acceptable of defaults, similar settings connected a power board. When the quantum fields that permeate abstraction beryllium astatine these default values, you see abstraction to beryllium empty. Small tweaks to the settings make particles—turn the electromagnetic tract up a bit, and you get a photon. Big tweaks, connected the different hand, are champion thought of arsenic caller defaults altogether. They make a antithetic explanation of bare space, with antithetic traits.

One quantum tract is peculiar due to the fact that its default worth tin change. Called the Higgs field, it controls the wide of galore cardinal particles, similar electrons and quarks. Unlike each different quantum tract physicists person discovered, the Higgs tract has a default worth supra zero. Dialing the Higgs tract worth up oregon down would summation oregon alteration the wide of electrons and different particles. If the mounting of the Higgs tract were zero, those particles would beryllium massless.

We could enactment astatine the nonzero default for eternity, were it not for quantum mechanics. A quantum tract tin “tunnel,” jumping to a new, lower-energy worth adjacent if it doesn’t person capable vigor to walk done the higher-energy intermediate settings, an effect akin to tunneling done a coagulated wall.

For this to happen, you request to person a lower-energy authorities to passageway to. And earlier gathering the Large Hadron Collider, physicists thought that the existent authorities of the Higgs tract could beryllium the lowest. That content has present changed.

The curve that represents the vigor required for antithetic settings of the Higgs tract was ever known to lucifer a sombrero with an upturned brim. The existent mounting of the Higgs tract tin beryllium pictured arsenic a shot resting astatine the bottommost of the brim.