Nonperturbative Stability of Supergravity and Superstring Vacua

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that supersymmetric vacua in $N=1$ supergravity are absolutely stable against false vacuum decay, using a Bogomol'nyi bound, with implications for superstring theory stability.

Contribution

It establishes a nonperturbative stability proof for supersymmetric vacua in supergravity, extending previous perturbative results and analyzing domain wall configurations.

Findings

Supersymmetric vacua are stable against decay into other supersymmetric vacua.

No compact static spherical domain walls exist in these theories.

Implications for stability in superstring theory and supersymmetry breaking.

Abstract

We investigate the possibility of false vacuum decay in $N=1$ supergravity theories. By establishing a Bogomol'nyi bound for the energy density stored in the domain wall of the $O(4)$ invariant bubble, we show that supersymmetric vacua remain absolutely stable against false vacuum decay into another supersymmetric vacuum. This conforms with and completes the previous perturbative analysis of Weinberg. Implications for dynamical supersymmetry breaking and decompactification instabilities in superstring theory are discussed. In addition, we show that there are no compact static spherical domain walls.