Enhanced Brane Tunneling and Instanton Wrinkles

Stringy effects on vacuum transitions are shown to include surprisingly large decay rates through very high potential barriers. This simple yet counterintuitive result will drastically modify the measure on the landscape of string vacua.

Figure 1

A potential.

Figure 2

A nonrelativistic (dashed), relativistic (solid), and supercritical (dotted) profile for $\varphi (\rho )$. Regions with negative slope describe the wrinkle of “antibrane.” The supercritical case does not describe a transition but rather brane nucleation.