  Membrane nucleation, a higher dimensional analog of the Schwinger effect, is
a useful toy model for vacuum decay. While a non-perturbative effect, the
computation of nucleation rates has only been accomplished at weak coupling in
the field theory. Here we compute the nucleation rates of spherical membranes
using AdS/CFT duality, thus naturally including the effects of strong coupling.
More precisely, we consider the nucleation of spherical membranes coupled to an
antisymmetric tensor field, a process which renders the vacuum unstable above a
critical value of the field strength. We analyze membrane creation in flat and
de Sitter space using various foliations of AdS. This is accomplished via
instanton methods, where the rate of nucleation is dominated by the
semi-classical on-shell Euclidean action. Our findings generalize the
holographic Schwinger effect and provide a step toward holographic false vacuum
decay mediated by Coleman-De Luccia instantons.
