Abstract
Gravitational instantons with NUT charge are magnetic monopoles upon dimensional reduction. We determine whether NUT charge can proliferate via the Polyakov mechanism and partially screen gravitational interactions. In semiclassical Einstein gravity, Taub-NUT instantons experience a universal attractive force in the path integral that prevents proliferation. This attraction further leads to semiclassical clumping instabilities, similar to the known instabilities of hot flat space and the Kaluza-Klein vacuum. Beyond pure Einstein gravity, NUT proliferation depends on the following question: is the mass of a gravitational instanton in the theory always greater than its NUT charge? Using spinorial methods we show that the answer to this question is `yes' if all matter fields obey a natural Euclidean energy condition. Therefore, the attractive force between instantons in the path integral wins out and gravity is dynamically protected against screening. Semiclassical gravity with a compactified circle can be self-consistently quantum ordered, at the cost of suffering from clumping instabilities.
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