False Vacuum - Vacuum Metastability Event

Vacuum Metastability Event

Further information: Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider#Critics of high energy experiments and Safety of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider

A hypothetical vacuum metastability event' would be theoretically possible if our universe was part of a metastable (false) vacuum in the first place, an issue that is highly theoretical and far from resolved. A false vacuum is one that appears stable, and is stable within certain limits and conditions, but is capable of being disrupted and entering a different state which is more stable. In theory and if this were the case, a bubble of lower-energy vacuum could come to exist by chance or otherwise in our universe, and catalyze the conversion of our universe to a lower energy state in a volume expanding at nearly the speed of light, destroying all that we know without forewarning. Chaotic Inflation theory suggests that the universe may be in either a false vacuum or a true vacuum state.

A paper by Coleman and de Luccia notes that:

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

Sidney Coleman & F. de Luccia

Such an event would be one possible doomsday event. It was used as a plot device in a science-fiction story in 1988 by Geoffrey A. Landis, in 2000 by Stephen Baxter, and in 2002 by Greg Egan.

In theory high enough energy concentrations or random chance could both trigger the tunneling needed to set this event in motion. However an immense number of ultra-high energy particles and events have occurred in the history of our universe, dwarfing by many orders of magnitude any events at human disposal. Hut and Rees, note that, because we have observed cosmic ray collisions at much higher energies than those produced in terrestrial particle accelerators, these experiments will not, at least for the foreseeable future, pose a threat to our current vacuum. Particle accelerations have reached energies of only approximately eight tera electron volts (8×1012 eV). Cosmic ray collisions have been observed at and beyond energies of 1018 eV, a million times more powerful - the so-called Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit - and other cosmic events may be more powerful yet. Against this, John Leslie has argued that if present trends continue, particle accelerators will exceed the energy given off in naturally occurring cosmic ray collisions by the year 2150. Fears of this kind were raised by critics of both the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider at the time of their respective proposal, and determined to be unfounded by scientific inquiry.