Presented By: Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics
HET Seminar | de Sitter decays to infinity
Patrick Draper (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
The bubble of nothing is a gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling through a vanishing scalar potential barrier to a vacuum at infinity. I will discuss generalizations of this process to nonzero scalar potentials with metastable de Sitter vacua. In simple cases, approximate bubble-of-nothing solutions can be constructed analytically. More generally, the problem can be formulated as a set of CdL equations with singular boundary conditions and solved numerically.