On Witten's Instability and Winding Tachyons

Abstract

We investigate, from a spacetime perspective, some aspects of Horowitz's recent conjecture that black strings may catalyze the decay of Kaluza-Klein spacetimes into a bubble of nothing. We identify classical configurations that interpolate between flat space and the bubble, and discuss the energetics of the transition. We investigate the effects of winding tachyons on the size and shape of the barrier and find no evidence at large compactification radius that tachyons enhance the tunneling rate. For the interesting radii, of order the string scale, the question is difficult to answer due to the failure of the ${\alpha }^{\prime }$ expansion.

15 pages, 2 figures, Latex

References in corpus (19)

• Black Strings and p-Branes are Unstable
• Type IIA Moduli Stabilization
• Casimir Effect Between World-Branes in Heterotic M-Theory
• Gravitational instability in higher dimensions
• Clean Time-Dependent String Backgrounds from Bubble Baths
• Things Fall Apart: Topology Change from Winding Tachyons
• The Inside Story: Quasilocal Tachyons and Black Holes
• Closed String Tachyon Condensation: An Overview
• Tachyon Condensation and Black Strings
• Heretics of the False Vacuum: Gravitational Effects On and Of Vacuum Decay 2
• Remarks on Black Hole Instabilities and Closed String Tachyons
• Catastrophic Decays of Compactified Space-Times
• Winding tachyons in asymptotically supersymmetric black strings
• Critical bubbles and implications for critical black strings
• Collapse of Kaluza-Klein Bubbles
• The Nothing at the Beginning of the Universe Made Precise
• Semi-localized instability of the Kaluza-Klein linear dilaton vacuum
• Closed String Tachyons and Their Implications for Non-Supersymmetric Strings
• A Note on Perturbative and Nonperturbative Instabilities of Twisted Circles

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Fractional Brane State in the Early Universe
• On Bubbles of Nothing in AdS/CFT
• Magnetic Charge Can Locally Stabilize Kaluza-Klein Bubbles
• Gravitational Instabilities and Censorship of Large Scalar Field Excursions
• Intersecting non-SUSY branes and closed string tachyon condensation
• Black Hole - String Transition and Rolling D-brane
• Exact Solutions and Black Hole Stability in Higher Dimensional Supergravity Theories