Bubbles of Nothing and the Fastest Decay in the Landscape

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.

18 pages, 8 figures; v2: minor changes

References in corpus (7)

• Rapid Tunneling and Percolation in the Landscape
• Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape
• Bubbles of Nothing in Flux Compactifications
• Decay of flux vacua to nothing
• Giant Leaps and Minimal Branes in Multi-Dimensional Flux Landscapes
• An obstacle to populating the string theory landscape
• The Case of the Disappearing Instanton

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• The Case of the Disappearing Instanton
• Bubbles from Nothing
• Bubble of nothing decays of unstable theories
• de Sitter Decays to Infinity
• A Smooth Landscape: Ending Saddle Point Inflation Requires Features to be Shallow
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