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Black holes as bubble nucleation sites

Gregory, R.; Moss, I.; Withers, B.

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Authors

R. Gregory

I. Moss

B. Withers



Abstract

We consider the effect of inhomogeneities on the rate of false vacuum decay. Modelling the inhomogeneity by a black hole, we construct explicit Euclidean instantons which describe the nucleation of a bubble of true vacuum centred on the inhomogeneity. We find that inhomogeneity significantly enhances the nucleation rate over that of the Coleman-de Luccia instanton — the black hole acts as a nucleation site for the bubble. The effect is larger than previously believed due to the contributions to the action from conical singularities. For a sufficiently low initial mass, the original black hole is replaced by flat space during this process, as viewed by a single causal patch observer. Increasing the initial mass, we find a critical value above which a black hole remnant survives the process. This resulting black hole can have a higher mass than the original black hole, but always has a lower entropy. We compare the process to bubble-to-bubble transitions, where there is a semi-classical Lorentzian description in the WKB approximation.

Citation

Gregory, R., Moss, I., & Withers, B. (2014). Black holes as bubble nucleation sites. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2014(3), https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep03%282014%29081

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Mar 17, 2014
Deposit Date Sep 11, 2014
Publicly Available Date Sep 24, 2014
Journal Journal of High Energy Physics
Print ISSN 1126-6708
Publisher Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 2014
Issue 3
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep03%282014%29081
Keywords Cosmology of theories beyond the SM, Black holes, Solitons monopoles and instantons.

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Published Journal Article (750 Kb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2014 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.





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