Abstract
It has been known that the catalytic effect makes the life-time of a metastable state shorter. We discuss this phenomenon in a decay process of a metastable vacuum in the brane limit of type IIB string theory. Due to the non-linear effect of the DBI action, the bubble created by the decay makes an energetically favorable bound state with an impurity that plays the role of catalyst, which is quite specific to this model and different from other catalysts such as a back hole. Furthermore, we found that this low-energy effective theory around almost unstable regions reduces to a simple quantum mechanical system, and the vacuum life-time can be calculated using known results, even beyond the WKB approximation. Finally, we compare the life-time of the vacuum with the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) and find that there is a nonzero window to satisfy the TCC condition for gs ≲ \( \mathcal{O} \)(1).
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Yutaka Ookouchi for providing us with this project and the collaboration in the early stages. We also thank Issei Koga and Yuri Okubo for their valuable discussions. Finally, we express our sincere thanks to the referees for useful comments. This work is supported by the Kyushu University Leading Human Resources Development Fellowship Program.
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Tsukahara, S. Life-time of metastable vacuum in string theory and trans-Planckian censorship conjecture. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 109 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2023)109
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2023)109