Abstract

Some years ago it was shown that the cosmological constant may be reduced by thermal production of membranes that, after nucleation, collapse into a black hole. The probability of the process was calculated in the leading semiclassical approximation by studying an associated Euclidean configuration called the thermalon. Here we investigate the thermalon in three spacetime dimensions, describing the nucleation of closed strings that collapse into point particle singularities. In this context we may analyze the one-loop structure without the well-known problems brought in by the propagating gravitational degrees of freedom. We found that the coupling to gravity may increase the number of negative eigenvalues of the operator. © 2008 The American Physical Society.