Metastability in Anti de Sitter Space

TL;DR

This work investigates metastable AdS vacua in the string landscape, focusing on their nonperturbative decay via Coleman–de Luccia transitions and the resulting AdS/CFT implications. It derives a precise thin-wall CDL geometry for AdS→AdS decay, including an Israel-junction-based tension bound $\sigma \le \frac{1}{4\pi G}\left(\frac{1}{R_-}-\frac{1}{R_+}\right)$, and analyzes the consequences for multi-bubble dynamics, showing that AdS bubbles reach the boundary in finite time, which severely limits observer lifetimes and challenges global metastability. The paper then examines prospects for a field-theory dual, arguing that conventional AdS/CFT descriptions fail due to bubbles encroaching on the boundary, and discusses regulated EFT duals valid only for deep bulk observables with a time cutoff $\tau'_c \approx \frac{1}{\Lambda (\Lambda R)^d (\Gamma R^{d+1})}$. It surveys related work and connects these ideas to eternal inflation, concluding that metastable AdS undermines standard holographic approaches in that context, while suggesting avenues to refine EFT descriptions and identify explicit duals. Overall, the results highlight fundamental limitations of holography for metastable AdS and raise important questions about measuring and modeling such vacua in the landscape.

Abstract

I discuss conceptual issues associated with the presence of metastable AdS vacua in the string landscape. The geometry of the decay from one AdS to another is presented in detail, and various subtleties that are not present for flat or dS vacua are demonstrated and analyzed. I use mostly semiclassical gravity, but I will consider the implications for recent attempts to construct field theory duals of metastable AdS vacua and also possible relevance to the study of eternal inflation.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Location of inside and outside coordinate patches in the $\tau$-$\theta$ plane of global coordinates are shown on the left and right above. $\theta$ is on the horizontal axis, and the boundary is at $\theta=\pi/2$ Lines of constant $\xi$ and $t$ are blue.