Pith. sign in

REVIEW 1 cited by

Bubble of nothing decays of unstable theories

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2105.08068 v2 pith:ABB3FRDO submitted 2021-05-17 hep-th gr-qchep-ph

classification hep-thgr-qchep-ph
keywords dimensionsnothingtheoriesbubblebubblesdecayenergyextra
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original 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.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. An Exploration of Vacuum-Decay Valleys

    hep-th 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Single-field potentials can exhibit 2n+1 distinct vacuum-decay bounces, including antibounces that standard overshoot/undershoot algorithms miss, connected by families of pseudo-bounces.

Pith tools