De Sitter Space and the Swampland

By G. Obied, Hirosi Ooguri, L. Spodyneiko, C. Vafa. 2018

637 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been notoriously difficult to construct a meta-stable de Sitter (dS) vacuum in string theory in a controlled approximation. This suggests the possibility that meta-stable dS belongs to the swampland. In this paper, we propose a swampland criterion in the form of $|\nabla V|\geq\ c \cdot V$ for a scalar potential $V$ of any consistent theory of quantum gravity, for a positive constant $c$. In particular, this bound forbids dS vacua. The existence of this bound is motivated by the abundance of string theory constructions and no-go theorems which exhibit this behavior. We also extend some of the well-known no-go theorems for the existence of dS vacua in string theory to more general accelerating universes and reinterpret the results in terms of restrictions on allowed scalar potentials.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/599c99078a502b7d462d0b8783ff4a2c4436dc19

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Dark energy in the swampland (2018, background): “In this context, the Swampland [2] emerges as the inhabitable landscape of field theories that are incompatible with quantum gravity.”
On the cosmological implications of the string Swampland (2018, background): “The second Swampland criterion, which was recently conjectured in [7], is motivated by the observation that it appears to be difficult to construct any reliable dS vacua and by experience with string constructions of scalar potentials.”
Trans-Planckian Censorship and the Swampland (2019, methodology): “The conjecture in [1] was mainly due to observations of the structure of the scalar potentials one obtains in string theory, for which with current techniques we have information only at weak couplings which corresponds to large scalar field expectation values.”
Bounds on slow roll and the de Sitter Swampland (2018, methodology): “Some of these solutions in fact do contain solutions that naively violate the bound of [7].”
De Sitter vs Quintessence in String Theory (2018, background): “with V0 = 0 and fine tunable) can be constructed that will satisfy the conjecture of [8].”
Uplifting Runaways (2018, background): “Moreover, our construction allows for the first top-down calculation of V ′ V in a regime of parameters where V is parametrically smaller than the string scale, and our results are consistent with the expectations of [19].”