Instantons in stochastic quantisation (Q1116565)

Bosonic field theories may be formulated in terms of stochastic differential equations. The characteristics long term behaviour of these systems is a decay into the global minimum of their Hamiltonian. If local minima exist, the rate of this decay is determined by instanton effects. We calculate the decay rate and perform computer simulations on a \(1+1\) dimensional model to test the instanton approximation. We find the instanton approximations to be in very good agreement with the simulation results.