Multiple vacuums in a lattice formulation of the two-dimensional Abelian Higgs model

This paper presents a lattice formulation of the Abelian one-space-one-time-dimensional Higgs model. The emphasis of our study is to show that this formulation correctly gives all the physics of a theory with multiple vacuums. We find that these effects have a simple physical interpretation in terms of a background $E$ field. Comparison is made to results from a path-integral calculation including instanton contributions.