  In the standard procedure for calculating the decay rate of a metastable
vacuum the solution of the classical Euclidean equation of motion of the
background field is needed. On the other hand radiative corrections have to be
taken into account already in the equation of motion. Hence, the latter one has
to be the functional derivative of the effective action with respect to the
background field. This is of crucial importance in theories in which the
symmetry breaking is due to radiative corrections. Usually the effective
potential is considered only, neglecting the corrections due to the derivative
terms of the effective action. In this article a bounce solution from an
equation of motion which takes into account the full effective action in the
one-loop approximation is calculated. A computational method that yields a
strict separation of the divergent contributions to the effective action from
the convergent ones is obtained. This allows a wide freedom in the choice of
regularization and renormalization schemes. The model under consideration is
the SU(2)-Higgs model. The fluctuations of the complete bosonic sector, i.e.
gauge field, Higgs and Goldstone boson contributions, are taken into account.
The bounce is then self-consistent to one-loop order. The obtained results for
characteristic quantities of the transition as the nucleation rate and the
number of nucleated bubbles per volume are compared to other,
non-self-consistent approaches.
