Small steps and giant leaps in the landscape

Journal Article · Fri Oct 15 00:00:00 EDT 2010 · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.82.083519· OSTI ID:21432365

Brown, Adam R ^[1]; Dahlen, Alex ^[2]

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1. Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, Princeton, New Jersey 08544 (United States)
2. Physics Department, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544 (United States)

For landscapes of field-theory vacua, we identify an effect that can greatly enhance the decay rates to wildly distant minima - so much so that such transitions may dominate over transitions to near neighbors. We exhibit these 'giant leaps' in both a toy two-field model and, in the thin-wall limit, amongst the four-dimensional vacua of six-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory, and it is argued that they are generic to landscapes arising from flux compactifications. We discuss the implications for the cosmological constant and the stability of stringy de Sitter.

• OSTI ID: 21432365
• Journal Information: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 82, Issue 8; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.82.083519; (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0556-2821
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT
DE SITTER SPACE
EINSTEIN-MAXWELL EQUATIONS
FIELD THEORIES
FOUR-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
SIMULATION
STABILITY
EQUATIONS
FIELD EQUATIONS
MATHEMATICAL SPACE
SPACE