Power of Black Hole Physics: Seeing through the Vacuum Landscape

TL;DR

This paper extends black hole bounds to de Sitter spaces, deriving constraints on vacuum stability, lifetime, and curvature in the landscape, especially for inflationary vacua, highlighting the interplay between species count, mass, and instability.

Contribution

It generalizes black hole bounds to de Sitter vacua and explores their implications for vacuum stability and decay in the landscape, focusing on inflationary scenarios.

Findings

Vacua become more curved and unstable with more species and higher mass.

Constraints on vacuum lifetime due to decay into neighboring states.

Implications for the stability of inflationary vacua.

Abstract

In this paper we generalize the black hole bound of arXiv:0706.2050 to de Sitter spaces, and apply it to various vacua in the landscape, with a special emphasis on slow-roll inflationary vacua. Non-trivial constraints on the lifetime and the Hubble expansion rate emerge. For example, the general tendency is, that for the fixed number and the increasing mass of the species, vacua must become more curved and more unstable, either classically or quantum mechanically. We also discuss the constraints on the lifetime of vacua in the landscape, due to decay into the neighboring states.