Flux compactifications in Einstein-Born-Infeld theories

Abstract

We investigate the flux compactification mechanism in simple toy models of Einstein-Born-Infeld theories. These are the direct generalizations of the Einstein-Maxwell flux compactifications that recently gained fame as a toy model for tunneling in the landscape. Our investigation reveals that the Born-Infeld form does not significantly modify the qualitative result of the Einstein-Maxwell theory. for the case of Einstein-Higgs theory, however, we found that the effect of Born-Infeld nonlinearity is to render all q>1 extradimensional compactification unstable against semiclassical tunneling to nothing.