False Vacuum Decay in Deformed Gauge Theory

I present a calculation of the decay from a metastable vacuum state to the true ground state in a ``deformed'' QCD model. The deformed model coincides with undeformed Yang-Mills at strong coupling, but can be brought to weak coupling smoothly while preserving linear confinement, nontrivial vacuum structure, the proper $\theta$-dependence, and many other important aspects of true QCD. I show the presence of higher energy metastable vacuum states in this model, and discuss a euclidean bounce solution which gives a tunneling rate from one of these false vacuua to the true vacuum state. The calculation has been carried out in the semiclassical approximation and I present the numerical results, making comparisons with some old predictions for SU(N) gauge theories.