Heretics of the False Vacuum: Gravitational Effects On and Of Vacuum Decay 2

摘要

This paper reexamines the question of vacuum decay in theories of quantumgravity. In particular it suggests that decay into stable flat or AdS vacua,never occurs. Instead, vacuum decay occurs, if at all, into a cosmologicalspacetime. If the latter has negative cosmological constant, it undergoes a BigCrunch, which suggests that the whole picture is inconsistent. The question ofdecay of de Sitter space must be very carefully defined.