Vacuum Tunneling from Conifold Transitions in IIB

Abstract

We investigate the quantum tunneling process through a topology transition near a conifold singularity, in the setup of IIB CY3 orientifold compactification. We propose a novel method to do moduli stabilization in an extended moduli space, parametrized by both the geometric moduli and the light D3-brane wrapping modes arisen from the brane quantization. Assuming the absence of flux through the vanishing exceptional 3-cycle, we find two types of vacuum solutions, one corresponds to the resolved conifold and the other one is interpreted as a novel non-geometric phase. We compute the quantum tunneling rate between these two solutions and find that it is difficult to achieve a significantly large tunneling rate in the controllable regime.