Related papers: Much Ado About Nothing
The AdS/CFT correspondence is used to describe five-dimensional cosmology with a big crunch singularity in terms of super-Yang-Mills theory on R times S^3 deformed by a potential which is unbounded below. Classically, a Higgs field in the…
According to classical GR, negative-energy (AdS) bubbles in the multiverse terminate in big crunch singularities. It has been conjectured, however, that the fundamental theory may resolve these singularities and replace them by non-singular…
We study the dynamics of branes in configurations where 1) the brane is the edge of a single anti-de Sitter (AdS) space and 2) the brane is the surface of a vacuum bubble expanding into a Schwarzschild or AdS-Schwarzschild bulk. In both…
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 consider a scalar field theory with a Minkowski false vacuum and an unbounded (or very deep) true vacuum. We show compelling evidence that an AdS bubble of vanishing total energy, embedded in asymptotically flat spacetime, generically…
We consider ``bubbles of nothing'' constructed by analytically continuing black hole solutions in Anti-de Sitter space. These provide interesting examples of smooth time-dependent backgrounds which can be studied through the AdS/CFT…
We extend a well-known D-brane construction of the AdS/dCFT correspondence to non-abelian defects. We focus on the bulk side of the correspondence and show that there exists a regime of parameters in which the low-energy description…
We study M/D-branes in a null-brane background. By taking a near horizon limit, one is left with cosmological models in the corresponding Poincar\'e patches. To deal with their usual horizons, we either extend these models to global AdS or…
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…
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…
According to classical GR, Anti-de Sitter (AdS) bubbles in the multiverse terminate in big crunch singularities. It has been conjectured, however, that the fundamental theory may resolve these singularities and replace them by nonsingular…
We propose an interpretation of decays of a false vacuum into an $AdS$ region. The $AdS$ region is interpreted in terms of a dual field theory living on an end of the world brane which expands into the false vacuum.
We discover that a class of bubbles of nothing are embedded as time dependent scaling limits of previous spacelike-brane solutions. With the right initial conditions, a near-bubble solution can relax its expansion and open the compact…
In flat space and at finite temperature, there are two regimes of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. At low temperature, the decay proceeds through thermally-assisted tunneling described by periodic Euclidean solutions -- bounces…
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…
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…
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 study zero-temperature false vacuum decay in $D$ compact spatial dimensions and show that for volumes below a critical value a new bounce solution, different from Coleman's celebrated $O(D)$ bubble, mediates the decay process, and…
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 begin by reviewing the results on the decay of unstable D-branes in type II string theory, and the open-closed string duality proposal that arises from these studies. We then apply this proposal to the study of tachyon driven cosmology,…