Tunneling without barriers with gravity

Abstract

We consider the vacuum decay of the flat Minkowski space to an anti-de Sitter space. We find a one-parameter family of potentials that allow exact, analytical instanton solutions describing tunneling without barriers in the presence of gravity. In the absence of gravity such instantons were found and discussed by Lee and Weinberg more than a quarter of a century ago. The bounce action is also analytically computed. We discuss possible implications of these new instantons to cosmology in the context of the string theory landscape.