New Bubble Decays In Kaluza-Klein Theories

Abstract

We describe new bubble decays in pure D+1 dimensional Einstein theory with two compact directions. The instanton solution is constructed by analytic continuation of the Kaluza-Klein electrically charged black hole solution. We show that the instanton describes the decay of a Kaluza-Klein vacuum M^{D-1} x T^2 with a non-vanishing torus tilt parameter. The decay is produced by the creation of a bubble of nothing which expands with time. We compute the instanton action, which shows that this Kaluza-Klein vacuum becomes more stable as the torus tilt parameter is increased. As an application, we consider the decay of M-theory torus compactifications leading to type 0A/0B string theories.