Vacuum Tunneling from Conifold Transitions in IIB

Abstract

We investigate the quantum tunneling process through a topology transition near a conifold singularity, in the setup of IIB CY3 orientifold compactification. We propose a novel method to do moduli stabilization in an extended moduli space, parametrized by both the geometric moduli and the light D3-brane wrapping modes arisen from the brane quantization. Assuming the absence of flux through the vanishing exceptional 3-cycle, we find two types of vacuum solutions, one corresponds to the resolved conifold and the other one is interpreted as a novel non-geometric phase. We compute the quantum tunneling rate between these two solutions and find that it is difficult to achieve a significantly large tunneling rate in the controllable regime.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: A demonstration of quantum tunneling between two local minima in the string landscape.
• Figure 2: A demonstration of the extended moduli space $\mathcal{M}_E$ containing two subspaces $\mathcal{M}_1$ and $\mathcal{M}_2$ that correspond to compact manifolds with different topology. $\mathcal{M}_1\cap\mathcal{M}_2$ corresponds to the locus where topology transition happens.
• Figure 3: Local geometry of the CY3-fold near the conifold singularity
• Figure 4: The string vacua $\mathcal{M}_{\mathcal{X}_6}$, $\mathcal{M}_{\tilde{\mathcal{X}}_6}$ with different topologies in the extended space $\mathcal{M}_{E}$
• Figure 5: The upper bound of $\mathscr{B}_g$ with the uplift $\delta$ to $V_f$ and $V_t$. The horizontal axis is the ratio $\delta/\epsilon$, where $\epsilon=V_f-V_t$.