Theory HEP Seminar

Bubble-Of-Nothing Decay of the de Sitter Universe

Benjamin Lillard

UIUC

If our apparently four-dimensional spacetime is endowed with compact extra dimensions, our universe may not be entirely stable. It can decay, by the spontaneous nucleation of a “bubble of nothing”: a gravitational instanton that induces a catastrophic annihilation of spacetime. In this talk we discuss the connection between the bubble of nothing and an analogous Coleman-De Luccia (CDL) tunneling process, and use the CDL formalism to calculate the bubble nucleation rate for a de Sitter universe with a single extra dimension. Even if the size of the extra dimension is fixed by some stabilization mechanism, the formation of bubbles of nothing can still be relatively prompt.