Vacuum Tunneling from Conifold Transitions in IIB

TL;DR

This paper studies quantum tunneling between different vacuum solutions near a conifold singularity in type IIB string theory, introducing a new moduli stabilization method involving geometric and brane modes, and finds tunneling rates are generally small.

Contribution

It proposes a novel moduli stabilization approach in an extended moduli space and analyzes tunneling between geometric and non-geometric phases in IIB compactifications.

Findings

Two vacuum solutions identified: resolved conifold and a non-geometric phase.

Quantum tunneling rate between these solutions is generally small.

Achieving large tunneling rates in the controllable regime is difficult.

Abstract

We investigate the quantum tunneling process through a topology transition near a conifold singularity, in the setup of IIB CY3 orientifold compactification. We propose a novel method to do moduli stabilization in an extended moduli space, parametrized by both the geometric moduli and the light D3-brane wrapping modes arisen from the brane quantization. Assuming the absence of flux through the vanishing exceptional 3-cycle, we find two types of vacuum solutions, one corresponds to the resolved conifold and the other one is interpreted as a novel non-geometric phase. We compute the quantum tunneling rate between these two solutions and find that it is difficult to achieve a significantly large tunneling rate in the controllable regime.