Membrane nucleation rates from holography

Abstract

Membrane nucleation, a higher dimensional analog of the Schwinger effect, is a useful toy model for vacuum decay. While a non-perturbative effect, the computation of nucleation rates has only been accomplished at weak coupling in the field theory. Here we compute the nucleation rates of spherical membranes using AdS/CFT duality, thus naturally including the effects of strong coupling. More precisely, we consider the nucleation of spherical membranes coupled to an antisymmetric tensor field, a process which renders the vacuum unstable above a critical value of the field strength. We analyze membrane creation in flat and de Sitter space using various foliations of AdS. This is accomplished via instanton methods, where the rate of nucleation is dominated by the semi-classical on-shell Euclidean action. Our findings generalize the holographic Schwinger effect and provide a step toward holographic false vacuum decay mediated by Coleman-De Luccia instantons.

Entangled universes in dS wedge holography

“…Furthermore, the two theories are in an entangled state in the full Hilbert space H UV ⊗ H IR , as is evident from the emergent space connecting the branes through the bulk. Indeed, as explained in section 2, we can JHEP10(2023)156 interpret our setting as a tunneling instanton describing membrane pair creation [94,95], analogous to the Schwinger effect (which gives rise to entangled EPR pairs) [96,97].…”

“…In a Euclidean setting, however, it is evident that the branes do not reach the boundary -see figure 2 implying that we cannot prepare the state using the more standard Euclidean path integral with sources turned on, even though our setup enjoys time-reflection symmetry in Lorentzian signature. In this case, however, we can interpret the brane configuration as a tunneling JHEP10(2023)156 instanton describing membrane creation [94,95], a higher dimensional generalization of the Schwinger effect [96,97]. This can be induced by turning on an antisymmetric tensor field in the boundary theory, with field strength above a certain critical value (to render the vacuum unstable).…”