1998/04/15 by Jaume Garriga, Garriga, Jaume · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-th/9804106
8 pages
arxiv created 1998/04/15 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
We present a non-singular instanton describing the creation of an open universe with a compactified extra dimension. The four dimensional section of this solution is a singular instanton of the type introduced by Hawking and Turok. The ``singularity'' is viewed in five dimensions as a smooth bubble of ``nothing'' which eats up a portion of spacetime as it expands. Flat space with a compact extra dimension is shown to be gravitationally metastable, but sufficiently long lived if the size of the extra dimension is large compared with the Planck length.