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Arbitrarily negative energy for small Kaluza-Klein bubbles

Gary T. Horowitz and Guanyu (Ricky) Lu

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 086015 – Published 28 October, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/xmm8-7kv6

Abstract

We show that the energy of a Kaluza-Klein bubble of nothing is unbounded from below even if the size of the circle at infinity and the size of the minimal sphere at the bubble are fixed. We demonstrate this by presenting a family of explicit time-symmetric initial data satisfying these boundary conditions with arbitrarily negative energy. In particular, this is true for very small bubbles, indicating that the standard Kaluza-Klein vacuum is more unstable than previously thought.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 086015– Published 28 October, 2025
  • Received 16 September 2025
  • Accepted 14 October 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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