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arXiv · 1010.5240

Bubbles of Nothing and the Fastest Decay in the Landscape

Adam R. Brown·Alex Dahlen
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Abstract

The rate and manner of vacuum decay are calculated in an explicit flux compactification, including all thick-wall and gravitational effects. For landscapes built of many units of a single flux, the fastest decay is usually to discharge just one unit. By contrast, for landscapes built of a single unit each of many different fluxes, the fastest decay is usually to discharge all the flux at once, which destabilizes the radion and begets a bubble of nothing. By constructing the bubble of nothing as the limit in which ever more flux is removed, we gain new insight into the bubble's appearance. Finally, we describe a new instanton that mediates simultaneous flux tunneling and decompactification. Our model is the thin-brane approximation to six-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory.

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Adam R. Brown, Alex Dahlen. 2011-09-23. Bubbles of Nothing and the Fastest Decay in the Landscape. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.84.043518

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