Vacuum Structure of de Sitter Space

Abstract

In the in-/out-state formalism we find the exact one-loop effective action of a massive scalar field in the global coordinates of de Sitter spaces, which is a gravity analog of the Heisenberg-Euler action in QED. The nonperturbative effective action, modulo the angular momentum sum, has an imaginary part in all even dimensions, but the imaginary part of the effective action is zero in all odd dimensions. However, in the zeta-function regularization for angular momenta, the weak-curvature expansion of the renormalized effective action vanishes in any even dimension, while the real part is finite in any odd dimension. This implies that de Sitter spaces may be stable against particle production at one-loop.