Black holes as bubble nucleation sites
By R. Gregory, I. Moss, Benjamin Withers. 2013
141 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A bstractWe 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.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6384fac663806e3d40be57eb01f33103b80afa04
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Black Hole Remnants and the Information Loss Paradox (2014, background): “Finally, we remark on the possibility that instead of giving rise to bubble universes inside, some black holes could themselves serve as bubble nucleation sites [291].”