Violation of Energy Bounds in Designer Gravity

Abstract

We continue our study of the stability of designer gravity theories, where one considers anti-de Sitter gravity coupled to certain tachyonic scalars with boundary conditions defined by a smooth function W. It has recently been argued there is a lower bound on the conserved energy in terms of the global minimum of W, if the scalar potential arises from a superpotential P and the scalar reaches an extremum of P at infinity. We show, however, there are superpotentials for which these bounds do not hold.

16 pages, 4 figures, v2: discussion of vacuum decay included, typos corrected, reference added