Thermal Decay of the Cosmological Constant into Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new thermal mechanism where membranes produced by the cosmological horizon can collapse into black holes, reducing the cosmological constant, with calculations of the process's probability in a semiclassical framework.

Contribution

It introduces a novel thermal decay process involving membrane production and collapse into black holes, providing a new perspective on cosmological constant reduction.

Findings

Membranes can be thermally produced by the cosmological horizon.

Produced membranes can collapse into black holes, reducing vacuum energy.

Calculated the probability of this process using semiclassical methods.

Abstract

We show that the cosmological constant may be reduced by thermal production of membranes by the cosmological horizon, analogous to a particle ``going over the top of the potential barrier", rather than tunneling through it. The membranes are endowed with charge associated with the gauge invariance of an antisymmetric gauge potential. In this new process, the membrane collapses into a black hole, thus the net effect is to produce black holes out of the vacuum energy associated with the cosmological constant. We study here the corresponding Euclidean configurations ("thermalons"), and calculate the probability for the process in the leading semiclassical approximation.