Related papers: Bubbles of nothing and AdS instabilities
We study non-perturbative instabilities of AdS spacetime in General Relativity with a cosmological constant in arbitrary dimensions. In this simple setup we explicitly construct a class of gravitational instantons generalizing Witten's…
We consider compactifications of massive IIA supergravity on a six-sphere. This setup is known to give rise to non-supersymmetric AdS$_4$ vacua preserving SO$(7)$ as well as G$_2$ residual symmetry. Both solutions have a round $S^6$ metric…
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…
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…
We construct instanton solutions describing the decay of flux compactifications of a $6d$ gauge theory by generalizing the Kaluza-Klein bubble of nothing. The surface of the bubble is described by a smooth magnetically charged solitonic…
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 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…
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…
Stable non-supersymmetric Anti-de Sitter (AdS) vacua of string theory are widely believed not to exist. In this letter, we analytically compute the full bosonic Kaluza-Klein spectrum around the ${\rm G_2}$-invariant non-supersymmetric…
Coleman-de Luccia transitions are spontaneous processes of nucleation of bubbles within metastable gravitational vacua including in their interior a true stable vacuum. From the perspective of lower-dimensional gauged supergravities…
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…
Supersymmetric vacua are protected from vacuum decay by energy positivity. No such argument is known for any non-supersymmetric vacua. In this paper, we try to extend to the latter a simpler argument based on calibrations, to at least…
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 construct a simple AdS_4 x S^1 flux compactification stabilized by a complex scalar field winding the extra dimension and demonstrate an instability via nucleation of a bubble of nothing. This occurs when the Kaluza -- Klein dimension…
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…
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 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…
Vacuum compactifications may suffer from instabilities under small perturbations or tunnel effects; both are difficult to analyze. In this paper we consider the issue from a higher-dimensional perspective. We first look at how stability…
We consider two infinite families of Non-Supersymmetric $AdS_4$ vacua, called Type 2) and Type 3) vacua, that arise in massive IIA supergravity with flux. We show that both families are perturbatively stable. We then examine…
With one exception, all known non-supersymmetric AdS$_4$ and AdS$_5$ vacua of gauged maximal supergravities that descend from string and M theory have been shown to have modes with mass below the BF bound. The remaining non-supersymmetric…