New Kaluza-Klein instantons and the decay of AdS vacua
Abstract
We construct a generalization of Witten's Kaluza-Klein instanton, where a higher-dimensional sphere (rather than a circle as in Witten's instanton) collapses to zero size and the geometry terminates at a bubble of nothing, in a low energy effective theory of M theory. We use the solution to exhibit the instability of nonsupersymmetric AdS5 vacua in M theory compactified on positive Kähler-Einstein spaces, providing further evidence for the recent conjecture that any nonsupersymmetric anti-de Sitter vacuum supported by fluxes must be unstable.
- Publication:
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Physical Review D
- Pub Date:
- July 2017
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevD.96.026016
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1703.03105
- Bibcode:
- 2017PhRvD..96b6016O
- Keywords:
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- High Energy Physics - Theory
- E-Print:
- 16 pages, 2 figures. v2: reference added