Conifolds and tunneling in the string landscape

Abstract

We investigate flux vacua on a variety of one-parameter Calabi-Yau compactifications, and find many examples that are connected through continuous monodromy transformations. For these, we undertake a detailed analysis of the tunneling dynamics and find that tunneling trajectories typically graze the conifold point-particular 3-cycles are forced to contract during such vacuum transitions. Physically, these transitions arise from the competing effects of minimizing the energy for brane nucleation (facilitating a change in flux), versus the energy cost associated with dynamical changes in the periods of certain Calabi-Yau 3-cycles. We find that tunneling occurs only when warping due to back-reaction from the flux through the shrinking cycle is properly taken into account.

Life at the interface of particle physics and string theory

“…This result holds for minima of the same potential, but arguments were given for parts of the landscape with different topologies as well. See Danielsson et al (2007); Chialva et al (2008);and Ahlqvist et al (2011) for a discussion of connections between Calabi-Yau flux vacua.…”

Analyzing multifield tunneling with exact bounce solutions

“…III. For the logarithmic potential (8), if the parameters scale as w g ¼ g γ w and m g ¼ g δ m, ϕ and r can be rescaled as…”

“…The string theory landscape motivates the study of multifield potentials with a large number of metastable vacua [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Since our Universe may have occupied a metastable vacuum in the past or may do so today, it is of cosmological interest to study tunneling out of metastable vacua [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Tumbling through a landscape: Evidence of instabilities in high-dimensional moduli spaces

“…Yet, tunneling trajectories in multidimensional field spaces are notoriously subtle and can exhibit unexpected features; explicit examples in the landscape are the conifunneling trajectories between monodromyrelated flux vacua found in [25] (see also [26,27]). An additional, and potentially pivotal, complication is that the different flux vacua that are not monodromy related are generally minima of distinct potentials.…”