Seeded vacuum decay with Gauss-Bonnet

A bstract We investigate false vacuum decay catalysed by black holes under the influence of the higher order Gauss-Bonnet term. We study both bubble nucleation and Hawking-Moss types of phase transition in arbitrary dimension. The equations of motion of “bounce” solutions in which bubbles nucleate around arbitrary dimensional black holes are found in the thin wall approximation, and the instanton action is computed. The headline result that the tunnelling action for static instantons is the difference in entropy of the seed and remnant black holes is shown to hold for arbitrary dimension. We also study the Hawking-Moss transition and find a picture similar to the Einstein case, with one curious five-dimensional exception (due to a mass gap). In four dimensions, we find as expected that the Gauss-Bonnet term only impacts topology changing transitions, i.e. when vacuum decay removes the seed black hole altogether, or in a (Hawking-Moss) transition where a black hole is created. In the former case, topology changing transitions are suppressed (for positive GB coupling α ), whereas the latter case results in an enhanced transition.