Tumbling through a landscape: Evidence of instabilities in high-dimensional moduli spaces

Abstract

We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum of the potential the usual semiclassical bubble nucleation rate, Gamma = A e^{-B}, increases rapidly as function of the number of fields in the theory. As a consequence, the fraction of vacua with tunneling rates low enough to maintain metastability appears to fall exponentially as a function of the moduli space dimension. We discuss possible implications for the landscape of string theory. Notably, if our results prove applicable to string theory, the landscape of metastable vacua may not contain sufficient diversity to offer a natural explanation of dark energy.

21 pages, 10 figures; Updated version, modified to include more refined numerical analyses and more detailed assessment of anthropic solutions to the cosmological constant problem

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• Flux Compactification
• Domain walls, near-BPS bubbles, and probabilities in the landscape
• A Wrinkle in Coleman - De Luccia
• Rapid Tunneling and Percolation in the Landscape
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• Field dynamics and tunneling in a flux landscape
• Conifolds and Tunneling in the String Landscape
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• Optimisation based algorithm for finding the action of cosmological phase transitions
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• A landscape for the cosmological constant and the Higgs mass
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• Gauge-fixing on the Lattice via Orbifolding
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• Topics in vacuum decay (Ph.D Thesis)
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