New Kaluza-Klein instantons and the decay of AdS vacua

Abstract

We construct a generalization of Witten's Kaluza-Klein instanton, where a higher-dimensional sphere (rather than a circle as in Witten's instanton) collapses to zero size and the geometry terminates at a bubble of nothing, in a low energy effective theory of M theory. We use the solution to exhibit instability of non-supersymmetric AdS_5 vacua in M Theory compactified on positive Kaehler-Einstein spaces, providing a further evidence for the recent conjecture that any non-supersymmetric anti-de Sitter vacuum supported by fluxes must be unstable.