De Sitter bubbles from anti-de Sitter fluctuations

Abstract

Cosmological acceleration is difficult to accommodate in theories of fundamental interactions involving supergravity and superstrings. An alternative is that the acceleration is not universal but happens in a large localized region, which is possible in theories admitting regular black holes with de Sitter-like interiors. We considerably strengthen this scenario by placing it in a global anti-de Sitter background, where the formation of 'de Sitter bubbles' will be enhanced by mechanisms analogous to the Bizon-Rostworowski instability in general relativity. This opens an arena for discussing the production of multiple accelerating universes from anti-de Sitter fluctuations. We demonstrate such collapse enhancement by explicit numerical work in the context of a simple two-dimensional dilaton-gravity model that mimics the spherically symmetric sector of higher-dimensional gravities.