Decay of flux vacua to nothing

Ramadhan, H. S.; Shlaer, Benjamin

doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2010/10/029

Cited by 26 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(117 reference statements)

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“…Instanton solutions similar to the one discussed here have been presented in the literature in the context of flux compactifications [30][31][32]. 10 On the other hand there is an important difference between those models and the one we study here.…”

Section: The Bubble Of Nothing In Winding Compactificationsmentioning

confidence: 75%

Bubbles of nothing and supersymmetric compactifications

Shlaer

Sousa

Urrestilla

2016

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

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We investigate the non-perturbative stability of supersymmetric compactifications with respect to decay via a bubble of nothing. We show examples where this kind of instability is not prohibited by the spin structure, i.e., periodicity of fermions about the extra dimension. However, such "topologically unobstructed" cases do exhibit an extra-dimensional analog of the well-known Coleman-De Luccia suppression mechanism, which prohibits the decay of supersymmetric vacua. We demonstrate this explicitly in a four dimensional Abelian-Higgs toy model coupled to supergravity. The compactification of this model to M 3 ×S 1 presents the possibility of vacua with different windings for the scalar field. Away from the supersymmetric limit, these states decay by the formation of a bubble of nothing, dressed with an Abelian-Higgs vortex. We show how, as one approaches the supersymmetric limit, the circumference of the topologically unobstructed bubble becomes infinite, thereby preventing the realization of this decay. This demonstrates the dynamical origin of the decay suppression, as opposed to the more familiar argument based on the spin structure. We conjecture that this is a generic mechanism that enforces stability of any topologically unobstructed supersymmetric compactification.1 See for example the discussion in [7]. 2 For a discussion of the pre-factor of the decay probability in this context see [8].

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Section: The Bubble Of Nothing In Winding Compactificationsmentioning

confidence: 75%

Bubbles of nothing and supersymmetric compactifications

Shlaer

Sousa

Urrestilla

2016

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

Self Cite

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“…More recently, instanton solutions with S 2 collapsing have been constructed in some models in six dimensions. Blanco-Pillardo, et al [28] considered the Einstein gravity in six dimensions coupled to SU (2) Yang-Mills gauge field and an adjoint Higgs field with a specific potential to break the gauge group to U (1) and found a smooth solution of this type. Brown and Dahlen [29] considred the Einstein-Maxwell system without the Higgs and added a domain wall as a source.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Kaluza-Klein instantons and the decay of AdS vacua

Ooguri

Spodyneiko

2017

Phys. Rev. D

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We construct a generalization of Witten's Kaluza-Klein instanton, where a higher-dimensional sphere (rather than a circle as in Witten's instanton) collapses to zero size and the geometry terminates at a bubble of nothing, in a low energy effective theory of M theory. We use the solution to exhibit the instability of nonsupersymmetric AdS 5 vacua in M theory compactified on positive Kähler-Einstein spaces, providing further evidence for the recent conjecture that any nonsupersymmetric anti-de Sitter vacuum supported by fluxes must be unstable.

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“…A direct consequence is that the 'bubbles from nothing' of [6] (see also [21,22]) do not mediate the quantum creation of a universe. 'Bubbles from nothing' are Minkowski bubbles of nothing with tension bigger than the BPS-bound, so that the instantons are compact.…”

Section: No Up-tunneling From Nothingmentioning

confidence: 99%

On “nothing” as an infinitely negatively curved spacetime

Brown

Dahlen

2012

Phys. Rev. D

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Nothing-the absence of spacetime-can be either an endpoint of tunneling, as in the bubble of nothing, or a starting point for tunneling, as in the quantum creation of a universe. We argue that these two tunnelings can be treated within a unified framework, and that, in both cases, nothing should be thought of as the limit of anti-de Sitter space in which the curvature length approaches zero. To study nothing, we study decays in models with perturbatively stabilized extra dimensions, which admit not just bubbles of nothing-topology-changing transitions in which the extra dimensions pinch off and a hole forms in spacetime-but also a whole family of topology-preserving transitions that nonetheless smoothly hollow out and approach the bubble of nothing in one limit. The bubble solutions that are close to this limit, bubbles of next-tonothing, give us a controlled setting in which to understand nothing. Armed with this understanding, we are able to embed proposed mechanisms for the reverse process, tunneling from nothing to something, within the relatively secure foundation of the Coleman-De Luccia formalism and show that the Hawking-Turok instanton does not mediate the quantum creation of a universe.

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Decay of flux vacua to nothing

Cited by 26 publications

References 55 publications

Bubbles of nothing and supersymmetric compactifications

Bubbles of nothing and supersymmetric compactifications

New Kaluza-Klein instantons and the decay of AdS vacua

On “nothing” as an infinitely negatively curved spacetime

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