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