Abstract
We construct wormholes supported by axion flux in the presence of a positive cosmological constant. The solutions describe compact, one-handle bodies colloquially known as kettlebell geometries. The wormholes are perturbatively stable, but regularity of the Euclidean geometry implies an upper bound on the axion flux. Viewed as no-boundary saddle points, wormholes are suppressed relative to the round sphere. The symmetric kettlebell with maximal axion density has vanishing Euclidean action. Continuing into the Lorentzian across the equator, the solutions describe two expanding branches of de Sitter space filled with an axion field that rapidly dilutes and which are connected by a quantum bounce across which the arrow of time reverses.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Jose Barbon, Ben Freivogel, Victor Gorbenko, Edward Morvan, and Martin Sasieta for several discussions, and especially to Simon Maenaut for sharing the code employed for the perturbative stability verification in appendix A; see [15] for upcoming work. We benefited from discussions with participants of the “Eurostrings 2023” workshop, where part of this work was presented, as well as the DAMTP workshop “Quantum de Sitter Universe”, funded by the Gravity Theory Trust and the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. SEAG thanks the University of Amsterdam and the Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics for their hospitality and support during the final stages of this project. The work of SEAG, TH, RT, and TVR is partially supported by the KU Leuven C1 grant ZKD1118 C16/16/005, the FWO Research Project G0H9318N and the inter-university project iBOF/21/084. JPVDS is supported by the Delta ITP consortium, a program of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW).
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Aguilar-Gutierrez, S.E., Hertog, T., Tielemans, R. et al. Axion-de Sitter wormholes. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 225 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2023)225
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2023)225