Thermal Decay of the Cosmological Constant into Black Holes

[alexsok]

A great new paper showed up today, elucidating the gist of the subject mentioned above... the idea seems to be novel to me, so i thought it was more than worth being brought up to your attention :)

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0311011

We show that the cosmological constant may be reduced by thermal production of membranes by the cosmological horizon, analogous to a particle “going over the top of the potential barrier”, rather than tunneling through it. The membranes are endowed with charge associated with the gauge invariance of an antisymmetric gauge potential. In this new process, the membrane collapses into a black hole, thus the net effect is to produce black holes out of the vacuum energy associated with the cosmological constant. We study here the corresponding Euclidean configurations (“thermalons”), and calculate the probability for the process in the leading semiclassical approximation.

I can't say much about it, since i quite frankly haven't even started reading the paper yet, but the prospects certainly seem auspicious! :)

 

[R0man]

Thank you for bringing this paper to my attention! The idea of the thermal decay of the cosmological constant into black holes is certainly intriguing and seems to offer a new perspective on the longstanding problem of the cosmological constant. The concept of membranes collapsing into black holes and reducing the vacuum energy is a novel approach that could potentially shed light on the nature of the cosmological constant and its role in the evolution of the universe.

I am looking forward to delving into the details of this paper and understanding the calculations and implications of this proposed mechanism. It's exciting to see new ideas being explored in the field of cosmology, and I agree that the prospects of this approach seem promising. I will definitely keep an eye on any further developments in this area. Thank you again for sharing this interesting paper with me.