Related papers: Nothing really matters
In the presence of a cosmological constant, interpreted as a purely geometric entity, absence of matter is represented by a de Sitter spacetime. As a consequence, ordinary Poincare' special relativity is no longer valid and must be replaced…
Nothing---the absence of spacetime---can be either an endpoint of tunneling, as in the bubble of nothing, or a starting point for tunneling, as in the quantum creation of a universe. We argue that these two tunnelings can be treated within…
The existence of de-Sitter solutions and their stability within string theory became, in recent years, one of the central research questions within the string theory community. The so-called de-Sitter conjecture states that the de-Sitter…
We study the nonlinear evolution of a weakly perturbed anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime by solving numerically the four-dimensional spherically symmetric Einstein-massless-scalar field equations with negative cosmological constant. Our…
If a state is passive for uniformly accelerated observers in n-dimensional anti-de Sitter space-time (i.e. cannot be used by them to operate a perpetuum mobile), they will (a) register a universal value of the Unruh temperature, (b)…
Finding four-dimensional de Sitter spacetime solutions in string theory has been a vexing quest ever since the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Building on a recent analysis of bubble-nucleation in the decay of…
We study the stability of a contracting {\it silent universe}, which is a spacetime with irrotational dust and vanishing magnetic part of the Weyl tensor, $H_{ab}=0$. Two general relativistic backgrounds are analyzed; one is an attractor of…
Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the Hilbert space of an isolated de Sitter universe is one dimensional but can appear larger when probed by a gravitating observer. To test this idea, we compute the von Neumann entropy of a field…
We consider the question of asymptotic observables in cosmology. We assume that string theory contains a landscape of vacua, and that metastable de Sitter regions can decay to zero cosmological constant by bubble nucleation. The asymptotic…
The Euclidean or Bunch-Davies O(4,1) invariant 'vacuum' state of quantum fields in global de Sitter space is shown to be unstable to small perturbations, even for a massive free field with no self-interactions. There are perturbations of…
We study the stability of vacua with spontaneously broken supersymmetry in N=2 supergravity theories with only hypermultiplets. Focusing on the projection of the scalar mass matrix along the sGoldstino directions, we are able to derive a…
We study the instantons describing the production of particles at the ends of codimension-one objects (strings and struts) in $(2+1)$-dimensional Minkowski and de Sitter spaces. A Minkowskian background allows only for systems with…
We consider Einstein gravity coupled to an n-form field strength in D dimensions. Such a theory cannot be supersymmetrized in general, we nevertheless propose a pseudo-Killing spinor equation and show that the AdS X Sphere vacua have the…
We describe the semiclassical decay of a class of orbifolds of AdS space via a bubble of nothing. The bounce is the small Euclidean AdS-Schwarzschild solution. The negative cosmological constant introduces subtle features in the…
In these lecture notes we discuss recently conjectured instability of anti-de Sitter space, resulting in gravitational collapse of a large class of arbitrarily small initial perturbations. We uncover the technical details used in the…
In this paper, the following two propositions are proven under the dominant energy condition for the matter field in the higher-dimensional spherically symmetric spacetime in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity in the presence of a cosmological…
In recent times, a considerable effort has been dedicated to identify certain conditions -- the so-called swampland conjectures -- with an eye on identifying effective theories which have no consistent UV-completions in string theory. In…
We show that in D=2n+1 dimensions, when mass is negative and all angular momenta are non-vanishing, Kerr and Kerr-AdS metrics describe smooth time machines, with no curvature singularity. Turning off the angular momenta appropriately can…
Motivated by the problem of stability of Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime, we discuss nonlinear gravitational perturbations of maximally symmetric solutions of vacuum Einstein equations in general and the case of AdS in particular. We present…
Within the framework of flux compactifications, we construct an instanton describing the quantum creation of an open universe from nothing. The solution has many features in common with the smooth 6d bubble of nothing solutions discussed…