Membrane nucleation rates from holography

TL;DR

This paper calculates membrane nucleation rates at strong coupling using holography, extending the understanding of vacuum decay processes beyond weak coupling regimes through AdS/CFT duality.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic method to compute membrane nucleation rates at strong coupling, generalizing the holographic Schwinger effect to vacuum decay scenarios.

Findings

Membrane nucleation rates computed via holography at strong coupling.

Extension of holographic Schwinger effect to false vacuum decay.

Analysis in flat and de Sitter spaces using instanton methods.

Abstract

Membrane nucleation, a higher dimensional analog of the Schwinger effect, is a useful toy model for vacuum decay. While a non-perturbative effect, the computation of nucleation rates has only been accomplished at weak coupling in the field theory. Here we compute the nucleation rates of spherical membranes using AdS/CFT duality, thus naturally including the effects of strong coupling. More precisely, we consider the nucleation of spherical membranes coupled to an antisymmetric tensor field, a process which renders the vacuum unstable above a critical value of the field strength. We analyze membrane creation in flat and de Sitter space using various foliations of AdS. This is accomplished via instanton methods, where the rate of nucleation is dominated by the semi-classical on-shell Euclidean action. Our findings generalize the holographic Schwinger effect and provide a step toward holographic false vacuum decay mediated by Coleman-De Luccia instantons.