surface charged with respect to the stabilizing flux. The bubble, located where an S 1 fiber degenerates, is singular due to the required de Sitter D3 branes smeared on the ❈ P 2 base. Our aim is to find non-singular solutions using a solitonic rather than smeared point-like sources. As pointed out in [12], our Lagrangian admits such solitonic solutions describing 2-branes charged with respect to the axion θ . We therefore conjecture that one should identify the solution described above, the bubble of nothing within our AdS$_{4}$ × S 1 flux compactification, as a de Sitter solitonic 2-brane in a 5 d AdS spacetime. We prove in the next section that one can indeed find such smooth bubble geometries in our model by numerically solving the equations of motion using the ansatz described above. Solutions for de Sitter branes as topological defects have been previously discussed in [21], whose numerical solutions introduced many characteristics found in our bubble of nothing. Here we give a different interpretation for these spacetimes in the context of flux compactifications. We illustrate such a bubble of nothing in Fig. (3) below. FIG. 3: An axionic bubble of nothing. As in Witten’s solution, the bubble wall lies where the S 1 extra dimension degenerates. In this case, the wall is charged under an axionic phase. Hue and saturation represent the scalar phase θ , and modulus f , respectively. The core of the solitonic 2-brane has an ill-defined phase, and is shown in black. The left-hand picture shows two large dimensions, with the apparent vertical separation representative of the KK radion. The right-hand picture shows the full KK extra dimension, but only one of the four large dimensions. 7