Related papers: Collapse of Vacuum Bubbles in a Vacuum
Theories with compact extra dimensions can exhibit a vacuum instability known as a bubble of nothing. These decay modes can be obstructed if the internal manifold is stabilized by fluxes, or if it carries Wilson lines for background gauge…
We study the gravitational collapse of a dust dark matter star in a $\Lambda$-background. We consider two distinct cases: First we do not have a dark matter and dark energy coupling; second, we consider that $\Lambda $ decay in dark…
Bubble universes and traversable wormholes in general relativity can be realized as two sides of the same concept. To exemplify, we find, display, and study in a unified manner a Minkowski-Minkowski closed universe and a Minkowski-Minkowski…
We argue that fields responsible for inflation and supersymmetry breaking are connected by gravitational couplings. In view of the recent progress in studying supersymmetry breaking in a metastable vacuum, we have shown that in models of…
Many models of high energy physics possess metastable vacua. It is conceivable that the universe can get trapped in such a false vacuum, irrespective of its origin and prior history, at an earlier stage during its evolution. The ensuing…
We consider bubble collisions in single scalar field theories with multiple vacua. Recent work has argued that at sufficiently high impact velocities, collisions between such bubble vacua are governed by 'free passage' dynamics in which…
Cosmic bubble collisions provide an important possible observational window on the dynamics of eternal inflation. In eternal inflation, our observable universe is contained in one of many bubbles formed from an inflating metastable vacuum.…
A quantum mechanical formulation of de Sitter cosmological spacetimes still eludes string theory. In this paper we conjecture a potentially rigorous framework in which the status of de Sitter space is the same as that of a resonance in a…
We study the decay of the false vacuum in the regime where the quantum field theory analysis is not valid, since gravitational effects become important. This happens when the height of the barrier separating the false and the true vacuum is…
We conjecture that all vacua in string theory decay. More precisely, non-supersymmetric vacua in string theory are at most metastable and eventually decay, while supersymmetric vacua are only marginally stable. All de Sitter vacua with…
We study large scale structure in the cosmology of Coleman-de Luccia bubble collisions. Within a set of controlled approximations we calculate the effects on galaxy motion seen from inside a bubble which has undergone such a collision. We…
During slow-roll inflation, non-perturbative transitions can produce bubbles of metastable vacuum. These bubbles expand exponentially during inflation to super-horizon size, and later collapse into black holes when the expansion of the…
The vacuum must contain virtual fluctuations of black hole microstates for each mass $M$. We observe that the expected suppression for $M\gg m_p$ is counteracted by the large number $Exp[S_{bek}]$ of such states. From string theory we learn…
We study the homogeneous gravitational collapse of a spherical cloud of matter in a super-renormalizable and asymptotically free theory of gravity. We find a picture that differs substantially from the classical scenario. The central…
We review some aspects of the dramatic consequences of supersymmetry breaking on string vacua. In particular, we focus on the issue of vacuum stability in ten-dimensional string models with broken, or without, supersymmetry, whose…
The late-time behavior of our universe is one of accelerated expansion, or that of a de Sitter space, and therefore motivates us to look for time-dependent backgrounds. Finding such backgrounds in string theory has always been a challenging…
To understand the nature of the black holes that exist in the Universe, it is also necessary to study what happens to the (quantum) matter that collapses and forms such objects. In this work, we consider a dust ball with an electrically…
The observed cosmological constant may originate as the minimum value $U_{min}$ of a scalar field potential, where the scalar field is frozen due to a large mass. If this vacuum is metastable, it may decay to a true vacuum either at present…
We discuss the Swampland Distance Conjecture in the framework of black hole thermodynamics. In particular, we consider black holes in de Sitter space and we show that the Swampland Distance Conjecture is a consequence of the fact that…
We use analytic estimates and numerical simulations to explore the stochastic approach to vacuum decay. According to this approach, the time derivative of a scalar field, which is in a local vacuum state, develops a large fluctuation and…