Coleman meets Schwinger
  It is well known that spherical D-branes are nucleated in the presence of an external RR electric field. Using the description of D-branes as solitons of the tachyon field on non-BPS D-branes, we show that the brane nucleation process can be seen as the decay of the tachyon false vacuum. This process can describe the decay of flux-branes in string theory or the decay of quintessence potentials arising in flux compactifications. 
Lorenzo Cornalba (Rome U., Tor Vergata & INFN), Miguel S. Costa and   Joao Penedones (Porto U.)