Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape

TL;DR

This paper uncovers a phenomenon called 'giant leaps' that significantly increase decay rates between distant vacua in landscape models, impacting cosmological stability and the cosmological constant.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of giant leaps in landscape decay processes, demonstrating their prevalence in flux compactifications and potential cosmological implications.

Findings

Giant leaps can dominate decay processes over near-neighbor transitions.

The effect is demonstrated in toy models and 6D Einstein-Maxwell theory.

Implications for the stability of stringy de Sitter are discussed.

Abstract

For landscapes of field theory vacua, we identify an effect that can greatly enhance the decay rates to wildly distant minima--so much so that such transitions may dominate over transitions to near neighbors. We exhibit these 'giant leaps' in both a toy two-field model and, in the thin-wall approximation, amongst the four-dimensional vacua of 6D Einstein-Maxwell theory, and it is argued that they are generic to landscapes arising from flux compactifications. We discuss the implications for the cosmological constant and the stability of stringy de Sitter.