Small steps and giant leaps in the landscape

Brown, Adam R.; Dahlen, Alex

doi:10.1103/physrevd.82.083519

Cited by 36 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…5; its position can be calculated in detail, as in [10]. Our argument in this paper will only rely on the possibility of nucleating a bubble of nothing, but in fact it can be shown that for some landscapes this is not only a possible decay, it is the fastest decay-the larger the stack of charged branes, the easier it is to nucleate [10,11]. We have thus constructed a whole family of possible decays that do not change the spacetime topology, but that hollow out in one limit.…”

Section: Flux Tunneling In the 6d Einstein-maxwell Theorymentioning

confidence: 97%

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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Section: Flux Tunneling In the 6d Einstein-maxwell Theorymentioning

confidence: 97%

On “nothing” as an infinitely negatively curved spacetime

Brown

Dahlen

2012

Phys. Rev. D

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“…Moreover, string theory offers the possibility of an enormous landscape of local minima, making it important to determine if tunneling events and bubble collisions are essential cosmological processes. These considerations have inspired numerous authors to study transitions between collections of metastable vacua, with results of possible importance to key outstanding issues, such as the cosmological constant problem and the search for experimental signatures of a multiverse [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kink Collisions in Curved Field Space

Ahlqvist

Eckerle

Greene

2015

J. High Energ. Phys.

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We study bubble universe collisions in the ultrarelativistic limit with the new feature of allowing for nontrivial curvature in field space. We establish a simple geometrical interpretation of such collisions in terms of a double family of field profiles whose tangent vector fields stand in mutual parallel transport. This provides a generalization of the wellknown flat field space limit of the free passage approximation. We investigate the limits of this approximation and illustrate our analytical results with numerical simulations.

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“…The key advantage of instanton diagrams is to single out critical instantons, whose existence determines the global structure of the space of solutions. A natural development of our work will be to attempt a more systematic analysis of extensions to theories with additional parameters, as well as extensions to multi-field [41][42][43][44][45][46] and reduced-symmetry instantons [47].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Zoology of instanton solutions in flat potential barriers

2013

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We perform a detailed study of the existence and the properties of O(4)-invariant instanton solutions in Einstein-scalar theory in the presence of flat potential barriers, i.e. barriers where the second derivative of the potential is small at the top of the barrier. We find a whole zoo of solutions: Hawking-Moss, Coleman-De Luccia (CdL), oscillating instantons, asymmetric CdL as well as other non-standard CdL-like solutions with additional negative modes in their spectrum of fluctuations. Our work shows how these different branches of solutions are connected to each other via "critical" instantons possessing an extra zero mode fluctuation. Overall, the space of finite action euclidean solutions to these theories with flat barriers is surprisingly rich and intricate

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Small steps and giant leaps in the landscape

Cited by 36 publications

References 30 publications

On “nothing” as an infinitely negatively curved spacetime

On “nothing” as an infinitely negatively curved spacetime

Kink Collisions in Curved Field Space

Zoology of instanton solutions in flat potential barriers

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