Thermal decay of the cosmological constant into black holes

We show that the cosmological constant may be reduced by thermal production of membranes by the cosmological horizon, analogous to a particle "going over the top of the potential barrier," rather than tunneling through it. The membranes are endowed with charge associated with the gauge invariance of an antisymmetric gauge potential. In this new process, the membrane collapses into a black hole; thus, the net effect is to produce black holes out of the vacuum energy associated with the cosmological constant. We study here the corresponding Euclidean configurations ("thermalons") and calculate the probability for the process in the leading semiclassical approximation.