Black holes as bubble nucleation sites

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

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
• Electronic ISSN: 1029-8479
• 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.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1454169