Decay of flux vacua to nothing

Abstract

We construct instanton solutions describing the decay of flux compactifications of a 6d gauge theory by generalizing the Kaluza-Klein bubble of nothing. The surface of the bubble is described by a smooth magnetically charged solitonic brane whose asymptotic flux is precisely that responsible for stabilizing the 4d compactification. We describe several instances of bubble geometries for the various vacua occurring in a 6d Einstein-Maxwell theory namely, AdS4 × S2, ℝ1,3 × S2, and dS4 × S2. Unlike conventional solutions, the bubbles of nothing introduced here occur where a two-sphere compactification manifold homogeneously degenerates.