Membrane nucleation rates from holography

Abstract

Membrane nucleation, a higher dimensional analog of the Schwinger effect, is a useful toy model for vacuum decay. While a non-perturbative effect, the computation of nucleation rates has only been accomplished at weak coupling in the field theory. Here we compute the nucleation rates of spherical membranes using AdS/CFT duality, thus naturally including the effects of strong coupling. More precisely, we consider the nucleation of spherical membranes coupled to an antisymmetric tensor field, a process which renders the vacuum unstable above a critical value of the field strength. We analyze membrane creation in flat and de Sitter space using various foliations of AdS. This is accomplished via instanton methods, where the rate of nucleation is dominated by the semi-classical on-shell Euclidean action. Our findings generalize the holographic Schwinger effect and provide a step toward holographic false vacuum decay mediated by Coleman-De Luccia instantons.

24 pages + appendices, 5 figures. v2: minor corrections and references added

References in corpus (21)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• Setting the boundary free in AdS/CFT
• The Schwinger mechanism revisited
• Towards observable signatures of other bubble universes
• Eternal inflation, bubble collisions, and the persistence of memory
• On the exact solution of the accelerating string in $Ad{S}_5$ space
• Conformally Coupled Scalars, Instantons and Vacuum Instability in AdS_4
• Holographic Schwinger effect in de Sitter space
• AdS Crunches, CFT Falls And Cosmological Complementarity
• Black holes in dS${}_3$
• Towards observable signatures of other bubble universes II: Exact solutions for thin-wall bubble collisions
• Generalized Lorentz-Dirac Equation for a Strongly-Coupled Gauge Theory
• Fluctuation and dissipation in de Sitter space
• A holographic description of the Schwinger effect in a confining gauge theory
• On Bubbles of Nothing in AdS/CFT
• Holographic Evolution with Dynamical Boundary Gravity
• Holographic thermalization in Gauss-Bonnet gravity with de Sitter boundary
• A Quantum-Mechanical Mechanism for Reducing the Cosmological Constant
• Revisiting Coleman-de Luccia transitions in the AdS regime using holography
• Hidden Variables of Gravity and Geometry and the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Characters, quasinormal modes, and Schwinger pairs in $d{S}_2$ with flux

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Worldsheet traversable wormholes