Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape

Abstract

For landscapes of field theory vacua, we identify an effect that can greatly enhance the decay rates to wildly distant minima--so much so that such transitions may dominate over transitions to near neighbors. We exhibit these 'giant leaps' in both a toy two-field model and, in the thin-wall approximation, amongst the four-dimensional vacua of 6D Einstein-Maxwell theory, and it is argued that they are generic to landscapes arising from flux compactifications. We discuss the implications for the cosmological constant and the stability of stringy de Sitter.

23 pages, 12 figures

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Cited by in corpus (26)

• Tumbling through a landscape: Evidence of instabilities in high-dimensional moduli spaces
• On 'Nothing'
• Bubbles of Nothing and the Fastest Decay in the Landscape
• On the Unlikeliness of Multi-Field Inflation: Bounded Random Potentials and our Vacuum
• Flux Discharge Cascades in Various Dimensions
• Conifolds and Tunneling in the String Landscape
• Supersymmetry Breaking and Stability in String Vacua: brane dynamics, bubbles and the swampland
• Decay of flux vacua to nothing
• Search Optimization, Funnel Topography, and Dynamical Criticality on the String Landscape
• Giant Leaps and Minimal Branes in Multi-Dimensional Flux Landscapes
• Probability of Slowroll Inflation in the Multiverse
• Oscillating instanton solutions in curved space
• Zoology of instanton solutions in flat potential barriers
• The Case of the Disappearing Instanton
• Bubbles from Nothing
• A Smooth Landscape: Ending Saddle Point Inflation Requires Features to be Shallow
• Goldilocks Models of Higher-Dimensional Inflation (including modulus stabilization)
• Flux Compactifications on $(S_2{)}^N$
• Validity of the kink approximation to the tunneling action
• Collapse of Vacuum Bubbles in a Vacuum
• Supersymmetry breaking, brane dynamics and Swampland conjectures
• Strongly Warped BPS Domain Walls
• Nonlinear dynamics of flux compactification
• A Quantal Theory of Restoration of Strong CP Symmetry
• Topics in vacuum decay (Ph.D Thesis)
• Non-supersymmetric heterotic strings on $Ad{S}_4\times S^3\times S^3$