Phenomenological late-time vacuum-tunneling models are fit to DESI DR2, supernova, and CMB data, allowing up to 50% vacuum-energy drop for z_t < 1 and a preferred z_t ~7 model that converts ~10% dark matter while easing cosmological tensions.
Tumbling through a landscape: Evidence of instabilities in high-dimensional moduli spaces
1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
1
Pith paper citing it
abstract
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum of the potential the usual semiclassical bubble nucleation rate, Gamma = A e^{-B}, increases rapidly as function of the number of fields in the theory. As a consequence, the fraction of vacua with tunneling rates low enough to maintain metastability appears to fall exponentially as a function of the moduli space dimension. We discuss possible implications for the landscape of string theory. Notably, if our results prove applicable to string theory, the landscape of metastable vacua may not contain sufficient diversity to offer a natural explanation of dark energy.
fields
astro-ph.CO 1years
2026 1verdicts
UNVERDICTED 1representative citing papers
citing papers explorer
-
Late-time Quantum Vacuum Decay and its Cosmological Implications
Phenomenological late-time vacuum-tunneling models are fit to DESI DR2, supernova, and CMB data, allowing up to 50% vacuum-energy drop for z_t < 1 and a preferred z_t ~7 model that converts ~10% dark matter while easing cosmological tensions.