Related papers: On Witten's Instability and Winding Tachyons
In this letter we consider a charged black hole in a flux compactification of type IIB string theory. Both the black hole and the fluxes will induce potentials for the complex structure moduli. We choose the compact dimensions to be…
We study the formation of superradiant bound states for massive scalar fields in five-dimensional rotating black string geometries with a non-vanishing Kaluza-Klein momentum along the compact direction. Even though all Kaluza-Klein modes…
We study smooth bubble spacetimes in five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory that resemble four-dimensional magnetic black holes upon Kaluza-Klein reduction. We denote them as Topological Stars since they have topological cycles supported…
Spacetime quantization predicts the existence of minimal length and time-interval. Within 5-dimensional Schwarzschild-like black string background, the tunneling of scalar particles, fermions and massive bosons are first studied together in…
We discuss condensations of closed string tachyons localized in compact spaces. Time evolution of an on-shell condensation is naturally related to the worldsheet RG flow. Some explicit tachyonic compactifications of Type II string theory is…
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 describe new bubble decays in pure D+1 dimensional Einstein theory with two compact directions. The instanton solution is constructed by analytic continuation of the Kaluza-Klein electrically charged black hole solution. We show that the…
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…
We investigate the evolution of small perturbations around black strings and branes which are low energy solutions of string theory. For simplicity we focus attention on the zero charge case and show that there are unstable modes for 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…
We investigate (2+1)-dimensional black strings in the Kaluza-Klein spacetime. The system is classically stable as long as the horizon size is much larger than the size of the compact space. Semiclassically, however, the horizon size shrinks…
String theory relies on spacetime supersymmetry to guarantee the existence of stable vacua. In this review, we survey two features of non-supersymmetric strings that challenge both aspects: the appearance of tachyons and worldsheet…
In this paper we investigate the tachyon instability of open bosonic string theory applying methods of boundary conformal field theory. We consider compactifications on maximal tori of various simple Lie algebras with a specific background…
Large, localized variations of light scalar fields tend to collapse into black holes, dynamically "censoring" distant points in field space. We show that in some cases, large scalar excursions in asymptotically flat spacetimes can be…
Kaluza-Klein theory admits ``bubble" configurations, in which the circumference of the fifth dimension shrinks to zero on some compact surface. A three parameter family of such bubble initial data at a moment of time-symmetry (some…
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…
We study bubble of nothing decays and their reverse processes, the creation of vacua through `bubbles of something', in models of the Universe based on string theory. From the four-dimensional perspective, the corresponding gravitational…
It is well-known that Scherk-Schwarz compactifications in string theory have a tachyon in the closed string spectrum appearing for a critical value of a compact radius. The tachyon can be removed by an appropriate orientifold projection in…
We indicate the tentative source of instability in the two-dimensional black hole background. There are relevant operators among the tachyon and the higher level vertex operators in the conformal field theory. Connection of this instability…
In the search for the exact minimum of the tachyon potential in the Witten's cubic string field theory we try to learn as much as possible from the string field theory in the large B-field background. We offer a simple alternative proof of…