On 'Nothing'

Abstract

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-to- nothing, 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.

26 pages, 12 figures, v2: minor updates, published as "On 'Nothing' as an infinitely negatively curved spacetime"

References in corpus (7)

• Vacuum decay into Anti de Sitter space
• Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape
• Bubbles of Nothing and the Fastest Decay in the Landscape
• Bubbles of Nothing in Flux Compactifications
• Populating the Whole Landscape
• Decay of flux vacua to nothing
• Bubbles from Nothing

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Sailing past the End of the World and discovering the Island
• de Sitter in non-supersymmetric string theories: no-go theorems and brane-worlds
• Phases of Holographic Interfaces
• Asymptotic safety and the cosmological constant
• Supersymmetry Breaking and Stability in String Vacua: brane dynamics, bubbles and the swampland
• Stability and Spectrum of Compactifications on Product Manifolds
• de Sitter Decays to Infinity
• de Sitter Bubbles and the Swampland
• Discreteness of time in the evolution of the universe
• The decay of hot KK space
• Goldilocks Models of Higher-Dimensional Inflation (including modulus stabilization)
• Flux Compactifications on $(S_2{)}^N$
• Long String Dynamics in Pure Gravity on AdS${}_3$
• Power-law Inflation Satisfies Penrose's Weyl Curvature Hypothesis
• Instantons in AdS${}_4$ From (anti)Membranes Wrapping $S^7$ To Bose-Fermi Duality in CFT${}_3$'s
• Inflation of small true vacuum bubble by quantization of Einstein-Hilbert action
• Waves in the Witten Bubble of Nothing and the Hawking Wormhole
• Do we live on the End of the World?
• Flux Compactifications Grow Lumps
• Fermions and Kaluza-Klein vacuum decay: a toy model
• Morse-Bott inequalities, Topology Change and Cobordisms to Nothing
• A Soliton and a Black Hole are in Gauss-Bonnet gravity. Who wins?
• Non-supersymmetric heterotic strings on $Ad{S}_4\times S^3\times S^3$