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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Bubble of nothing decays of unstable theories

Patrick Draper1,*, Isabel Garcia Garcia2,†, and Benjamin Lillard1,‡

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
  • 2Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA

  • *pdraper@illinois.edu
  • †isabel@kitp.ucsb.edu
  • ‡blillard@illinois.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 104, L121701 – Published 2 December, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.L121701

Abstract

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 that set the size of the extra dimensions are stabilized at a positive vacuum energy—a necessary ingredient of any theory that aspires to describe the real world. Using bottom-up methods, and focusing on a five-dimensional toy model, we show that four-dimensional de Sitter vacua admit bubbles of nothing for a wide class of stabilizing potentials. We show that, unlike ordinary Coleman-De Luccia tunneling, the corresponding decay rate remains non-zero in the limit of vanishing vacuum energy. Potential implications include a lower bound on the size of compactified dimensions.

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  44. The same conclusion follows from inspecting Eq. (4).

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Phys. Rev. D 104, L121701– Published 2 December, 2021
  • Received 6 July 2021
  • Accepted 15 October 2021
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