Related papers: The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple
I point out that the usual Coleman-de Luccia analysis of tunnelling via instantons between perturbatively stable minima using the thin-wall approximation misses one of the effects of gravitational backreaction on the on-shell action and…
Metastable states decay at zero temperature through quantum tunneling at an exponentially small rate, which depends on the Coleman-de Luccia instanton, also known as bounce. In some theories, the bounce may not exist or its on-shell action…
We introduce a new mechanism for producing locally stable de-Sitter or Minkowski vacua, with spontaneously broken N=1 supersymmetry and no massless scalars, applicable to superstring and M-theory compactifications with fluxes. We illustrate…
I provide some simple physical arguments that, once gravitation and some subtleties are taken into account, rather broad classes of potentials result in instantons which tunnel relatively rapidly between perturbatively stable minima. In…
We employ the graviton self-energy induced by a massless, minimally coupled (MMC) scalar on de Sitter background to compute the quantum corrections to the gravitational potentials of a static point particle with a mass $M$. The…
The vacuum decay in a de Sitter universe is studied within semiclassical approximation for the class of effective inflaton potentials whose curvature at the top is close to a critical value. By comparing the actions of the Hawking - Moss…
Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…
The kinematical phase space of classical gravitational field is flat (affine) and unbounded. Because of this, field variables may tend to infinity leading to appearance of singularities, which plague Einstein's theory of gravity. The…
We revisit the formalism for tunneling in quantum field theory developed by Coleman and collaborators. In particular using the generalization of WKB methods for tunneling in quantum mechanics we avoid the problems with negative eigenvalues…
We discuss the effect of gravitational interactions on the lifetime of the Higgs vacuum where generic quantum gravity corrections are taken into account. We show how small black holes can act as seeds for vacuum decay, spontaneously…
No-scale supergravity is the appropriate general framework for low-energy effective field theories derived from string theory. The simplest no-scale K\"ahler potential with a single chiral field corresponds to a compactification to flat…
The one-loop effective action for non-minimal scalar modified gravity on de Sitter background with a constant scalar field is found. The corresponding induced cosmological constant is evaluated. It is shown that quantum effects in…
We examine implications of the weak gravity conjecture for the mechanisms for discharging cosmological constant via membrane nucleations. Once screening fluxes and membranes which source them enter, and weak gravity bounds are enforced, a…
The de Sitter conjecture yields a severe bound on possible vacua for a consistent quantum gravity. We extend the de Sitter conjecture by taking into account dynamics of the scalar field. We then apply such an extended de Sitter conjecture…
We compute the one-loop quantum corrections to the gravitational potentials of a spinning point particle in a de Sitter background, due to the vacuum polarisation induced by conformal fields in an effective field theory approach. We…
We examine the descent via membrane nucleation through a landscape of vacua where the cosmological constant is given by a combination of four-form fluxes. It has been shown that this descent can be slowed exponentially for very low…
A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a…
The decay rates of quasistable states in quantum field theories are usually calculated using instanton methods. Standard derivations of these methods rely in a crucial way upon deformations and analytic continuations of the physical…
It is suggested that the Minkowski vacuum of quantum field theories of a large number of fields N would be gravitationally unstable due to strong vacuum energy fluctuations unless an N dependent sub-Planckian ultraviolet momentum cutoff is…
The tunneling potential formalism makes it easy to construct exact solutions to the vacuum decay problem in potentials with multiple fields. While some exact solutions for single-field decays were known, we present the first nontrivial…