Revisiting Coleman-de Luccia transitions in the AdS regime using holography

Abstract

Coleman-de Luccia processes for AdS to AdS decays in Einstein-scalar theories are studied. Such tunnelling processes are interpreted as vev-driven holographic RG flows of a quantum field theory on de Sitter space-time. These flows do not exist for generic scalar potentials, which is the holographic formulation of the fact that gravity can act to stabilise false AdS vacua. The existence of Coleman-de Luccia tunnelling solutions in a potential with a false AdS vacuum is found to be tied to the existence of exotic RG flows in the same potential. Such flows are solutions where the flow skips possible fixed points or reverses direction in the coupling. This connection is employed to construct explicit potentials that admit Coleman-de Luccia instantons in AdS and to study the associated tunnelling solutions. Thin-walled instantons are observed to correspond to dual field theories with a parametrically large value of the dimension ∆ for the operator dual to the scalar field, casting doubt on the attainability of this regime in holography. From the boundary perspective, maximally symmetric instantons describe the probability of symmetry breaking of the dual QFT in de Sitter. It is argued that, even when such instantons exist, they do not imply an instability of the same theory on flat space or on R × S3.

Holographic RG flows on Squashed S3

“…Spheres have been used to regulate otherwise singular holographic solutions in [8]. Holographic flows with de Sitter or other cosmological slices were analyzed in [9]- [14].…”

Membrane nucleation rates from holography

“…It would therefore be very interesting to consider full fledged vacuum decay, e.g., the Coleman-De Luccia mechanism [3], in the context of AdS/CFT, where gravity is allowed to be dynamical. There have been a plethora of previous studies on understanding false vacuum decay via AdS/CFT, e.g., [77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89]. One way of introducing dynamical gravity is through braneworld holography, 11 where one considers a bulk AdS spacetime with a brane inside with its own induced dynamical gravity (for a recent review see [91]).…”

Membrane nucleation rates from holography

“…It would therefore be very interesting to consider full fledged vacuum decay, e.g., the Coleman-De Luccia mechanism [3], in the context of AdS/CFT, where gravity is allowed to be dynamical. There have been a plethora of previous studies on understanding false vacuum decay via AdS/CFT, e.g., [78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90]. One way of introducing dynamical gravity is through braneworld holography, 12 where one considers a bulk AdS spacetime with a brane inside with its own induced dynamical gravity (for a recent review see [92]).…”