Nothing really matters

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We study non-perturbative instabilities of AdS spacetime in General Relativity with a cosmological constant in arbitrary dimensions.

• In this simple setup we explicitly construct a class of gravitational instantons generalizing Witten's bubble of nothing.
• We calculate the corresponding Euclidean action and show that its change is finite.
• The expansion of these bubbles is described by a lower-dimensional de Sitter geometry within a non-compact foliation of the background spacetime.