Related papers: Nothing really matters
In this contribution we review the ideas and results presented in the articles arXiv:2002.01764 and arXiv:2110.08276 where the decay of AdS vacua into bubbles of nothing is studied. We firstly consider AdS vacua in General Relativity with a…
We explore a classical instability of spacetimes of dimension $D>4$. Firstly, we consider static solutions: generalised black holes and brane world metrics. The dangerous mode is a tensor mode on an Einstein base manifold of dimension…
We construct a generalization of Witten's Kaluza-Klein instanton, where a higher-dimensional sphere (rather than a circle as in Witten's instanton) collapses to zero size and the geometry terminates at a bubble of nothing, in a low energy…
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 discuss non-perturbative instabilities, mediated by bubbles of nothing, in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. By exploring the phase diagram of such decays we give an interpretation of the process in terms of an effective…
A bubble of nothing is a spacetime instability where a compact dimension collapses. After nucleation, it expands at the speed of light, leaving "nothing" behind. We argue that the topological and dynamical mechanisms which could protect a…
Theories with compact extra dimensions are sometimes unstable to decay into a bubble of nothing -- an instability resulting in the destruction of spacetime. We investigate the existence of these bubbles in theories where the moduli fields…
We construct an instanton describing the pair production of non-Kaluza Klein bubbles of nothing in higher odd dimensional de Sitter spaces. In addition to showing that higher dimensional de Sitter spaces have a nonzero probability to become…
I present further analytic time symmetric initial data for five dimensions describing ``bubbles of nothing'' which have no Kaluza-Klein circle asymptotically. The new solutions consist of a large family of single bubbles in both…
Bubbles of nothing are a class of vacuum decay processes present in some theories with compactified extra dimensions. We investigate the existence and properties of bubbles of nothing in models where the scalar pseudomoduli controlling the…
We find constrained instantons in Einstein gravity with and without a cosmological constant. These configurations are not saddle points of the Einstein-Hilbert action, yet they contribute to non-perturbative processes in quantum gravity. In…
Constructing an explicit compactification yielding a metastable de Sitter (dS) vacuum in a UV consistent string theory is an incredibly difficult open problem. Motivated by this issue, as well as the conjecture that all non-supersymmetric…
We study the asymptotic stability of de Sitter spacetime with respect to non-linear perturbations, by considering second order perturbations of a flat Robertson-Walker universe with dust and a positive cosmological constant. Using the…
We consider spherically symmetric Einstein-massless-scalar field equations with negative cosmological constant in five dimensions and analyze evolution of small perturbations of anti-de Sitter spacetime using the recently proposed resonant…
We study the universal conditions for quantum non-perturbative stability against bubble nucleation for pertubatively stable AdS vacua based on positive energy theorems. We also compare our analysis with the pre-existing ones in the…
How the spacetime evolved non-perturbatively in a landscape with multiple anti-de Sitter (AdS) vacua, which is theoretically well-motivated, has always been a matter of concern. As a step towards this issue, we perform (3+1)D numerical…
Cosmological acceleration is difficult to accommodate in theories of fundamental interactions involving supergravity and superstrings. An alternative is that the acceleration is not universal but happens in a large localized region, which…
Supercritical string theories in D>10 dimensions with no moduli are described, generalizing the asymmetric orientifold construction of one of the authors. By taking the number of dimensions to be large and turning on fluxes, dilaton…
We investigate the non-perturbative stability of supersymmetric compactifications with respect to decay via a bubble of nothing. We show examples where this kind of instability is not prohibited by the spin structure, i.e., periodicity of…
Motivated by the lack of consensus on whether or not de Sitter (dS) lies in the Swampland, we use a recently developed braneworld construction and known Anti-de Sitter (AdS) vacua to compute an explicit effective dS cosmology in three…