de Sitter decays to infinity 

Speaker: 
Patrick Draper
Institution: 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Date: 
Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Time: 
11:00 am
Location: 
Zoom Seminar

Abstract: 
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. 
 

Host: 
Michael Ratz