Searching for Coleman–de Luccia bubbles in AdS compactifications

Abstract

Coleman-de Luccia transitions are spontaneous processes of nucleation of bubbles within metastable gravitational vacua including in their interior a true stable vacuum. From the perspective of lower-dimensional gauged supergravities obtained by truncating Type II and M-theory, these instantonic processes are represented by smooth domain walls featured by de Sitter foliations. These geometries must connect two different AdS vacua in such a way that the wall is defined by an interior and an exterior. We propose a first-order formulation for such radial flows and present two fully backreacted examples of gravitational instantons obtained through this technique, beyond the thin-wall approximation. In the first we consider minimal 7d supergravity describing the truncation of M-theory over a squashed 4-sphere and admitting two AdS$_7$ vacua, one supersymmetric and the other not. Secondly we apply the same strategy to 6d Romans supergravity obtained with consistent truncation of massive IIA supergravity. Also in this case we derive a dS domain wall interpolating between the Brandhuber-Oz vacuum and the non-supersymmetric AdS$_6$ vacuum of the theory.