Instability by Chern-Simons and/or Transgressions

Abstract: It was demonstrated recently that there is an upper bound of the Chern-Simons coupling of the five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory, beyond which the electrically charged AdS_2 \times S^3 vacuum solution becomes unstable. We generalize the result to a general class of gravity theories involving Chern-Simons and/or transgression terms and find their upper bounds for stability. We show that supergravities with AdS \times Sphere vacua satisfy the bounds.