Thermal decay of the cosmological constant into black holes

2003/11/30 by Andrés Gomberoff, Andres Gomberoff, Marc Henneaux +2 · 6 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.69.083520

published as Phys.Rev. D69 (2004) 083520 · 14 pages, 6 figures. Minor corrections

arxiv created 2004/01/29 · openalex publication_date 2004/04/27 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We show that the cosmological constant may be reduced by thermal production of membranes by the cosmological horizon, analogous to a particle ``going over the top of the potential barrier,'' rather than tunneling through it. The membranes are endowed with charge associated with the gauge invariance of an antisymmetric gauge potential. In this new process, the membrane collapses into a black hole; thus, the net effect is to produce black holes out of the vacuum energy associated with the cosmological constant. We study here the corresponding Euclidean configurations (``thermalons'') and calculate the probability for the process in the leading semiclassical approximation.

Citations

• Fate of the false vacuum: Semiclassical theory

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