Quantization of four-form fluxes and dynamical neutralization of the cosmological constant

By R. Bousso, J. Polchinski. 2000

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A four-form gauge flux makes a variable contribution to the cosmological constant. This has often been assumed to take continuous values, but we argue that it has a generalized Dirac quantization condition. For a single flux the steps are much larger than the observational limit, but we show that with multiple fluxes the allowed values can form a sufficiently dense `discretuum'. Multiple fluxes generally arise in M-theory compactifications on manifolds with non-trivial three-cycles. In theories with large extra dimensions a few four-forms suffice; otherwise of order 100 are needed. Starting from generic initial conditions, the repeated nucleation of membranes dynamically generates regions with λ in the observational range. Entropy and density perturbations can be produced.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3672f5d65ef72385b57b7f766b0598ea3c61086d

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Citations in the corpus

Flux compactifications in string theory: A Comprehensive review (2005, background): “Despite the flurry of activity in the field, we still lack of an understanding of whether any of the large amount of available perturbative vacua (the dense “discreetuum” [28], or “landscape” [29]) is in any sense preferred over the rest (either dynamical, cosmological or antrhopically).”
Relaxion monodromy and the Weak Gravity Conjecture (2015, methodology): “However, as emphasized in [40] the actual value of the 4form field strength in four dimensions (and not only its shift when crossing a membrane) satisfies Dirac quantization.”
Four-dimensional string compactifications with D-branes, orientifolds and fluxes (2006, background): “Polchinski [546] to the proposal that the cosmological constant might not be fixed by a dynamical principle to such a small value but that this fine tuning is ”solved” by merely the enormous vacuum degeneracy of string vacua.”
Categorizing Different Approaches to the Cosmological Constant Problem (2004, background): “Several inflationary scenario’s [113, 114, 115], quantum cosmologies, [109, 116, 117, 118, 119] and string theory [111, 120, 121, 122] predict different domains of the universe, or even different universes, with widely varying values for the different coupling constants.”
Les Houches Lectures on Constructing String Vacua (2008, methodology): “The reason we observe such a small cosmological constant is then attributed to environmental selection, giving a concrete realization in string theory of the ideas of [1, 103, 104].”
Fluxes, moduli fixing and MSSM-like vacua in a simple IIA orientifold (2005, methodology): “For each sub-torus we take a square lattice, consistent with the orientifold projection.”
The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “This role for the Landscape was first emphasized in [352], building on earlier similar ideas in [422–424].”
Observational consequences of a landscape (2005, methodology): “By the Landscape Paradigm we will mean three things [1, 2]:”
Racetrack Inflation (2004, background): “In this respect, the possibility that the eternally inflating universe becomes divided into many exponentially large regions with different properties [25, 59] and the related idea of the string theory landscape describing enormously large number of different vacua may be very helpful [60, 61, 35].”
MODELS OF PARTICLE PHYSICS FROM TYPE IIB STRING THEORY AND F-THEORY: A REVIEW (2012, methodology): “Furthermore, by varying W0 (achieved by varying the flux quanta) one obtains vacua whose cosmological constants are finely spaced – a dense discretuum as described in [3].”
Inflation in AdS/CFT (2005, background): “In recent years there has been dramatic progress in constructing string vacua with stabilized moduli and positive and negative cosmological constants [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11].”
Model building with $F$-theory (2008, background): “Following [42, 43], the number of supersymmetric solutions is then estimated to be given roughly by the volume of a ball in Euclidean space with dimension r given by the rank of this flux lattice, and a radius √ 2Λ1/2 that is set by global tadpole cancellation.”