Negative modes of Coleman-de Luccia and black hole bubbles

TL;DR

This paper investigates the negative modes of gravitational instantons involved in vacuum decay, revealing different behaviors between symmetric bubbles and black hole scenarios, and supporting black holes' role in false vacuum decay.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of negative modes in black hole and bubble instantons, highlighting the absence of extra negative modes in black hole cases, which was previously uncertain.

Findings

O(4)-symmetric bubbles have either one or infinite negative modes.

Black hole instantons have only one negative mode.

Results support black holes as seeds for false vacuum decay.

Abstract

We study the negative modes of gravitational instantons representing vacuum decay in asymptotically flat space-time. We consider two different vacuum decay scenarios: the Coleman-de Luccia $\mathrm{O}(4)$-symmetric bubble, and $\mathrm{O}(3) \times \mathbb{R}$ instantons with a static black hole. In spite of the similarities between the models, we find qualitatively different behaviours. In the $\mathrm{O}(4)$-symmetric case, the number of negative modes is known to be either one or infinite, depending on the sign of the kinetic term in the quadratic action. In contrast, solving the mode equation numerically for the static black hole instanton, we find only one negative mode with the kinetic term always positive outside the event horizon. The absence of additional negative modes supports the interpretation of these solutions as giving the tunnelling rate for false vacuum decay seeded by microscopic black holes.