High Energy Phenomenology Seminar: Isabel Garcia-Garcia (Kitp) "Gravitational instabilities of spacetime"
Speaker: |
(sign-up)
Isabel Garcia-Garcia (Kitp) |
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Date: | 11/5/2021 |
Time: | 12 p.m. |
Location: | Via ZOOM |
Event Contact: | Brandy Koebbe BKOEBBE@ILLINOIS.EDU |
Sponsor: | Department of Physics |
Event Type: | Seminar/Symposium |
Theories with compact extra dimensions can be unstable to decay into a bubble of nothing -- an instability that results in the destruction of spacetime. In this talk, I will discuss whether bubbles of nothing can exist in realistic theories where the moduli field responsible for setting the size of the extra dimensions is stabilized at a positive value of the vacuum energy. Using bottom-up methods, and focusing on a five-dimensional toy model, I will argue that four-dimensional de Sitter vacua admit bubbles of nothing for a wide class of stabilizing potentials. I will show that, unlike ordinary Coleman-De Luccia tunneling, the corresponding decay rate remains non-zero in the limit of vanishing vacuum energy, and that it can be faster than decay channels previously discussed in the literature. I will discuss potential implications on the physics of vacuum selection, as well as on the possibility of creating a Universe from "nothing". |