In the Swampland philosophy of constraining EFTs from black hole mechanics we study charged black hole evaporation in de Sitter space. We establish how the black hole mass and charge change over time due to both Hawking radiation and Schwinger pair production as a function of the masses and charges of the elementary particles in the theory. We find a lower bound on the mass of charged particles by demanding that large charged black holes evaporate back to empty de Sitter space, in accordance with the thermal picture of the de Sitter static patch. This bound is satisfied by the charged spectrum of the Standard Model. We discuss phenomenological implications for the cosmological hierarchy problem and inflation. Enforcing the thermal picture also leads to a heuristic remnant argument for the Weak Gravity Conjecture in de Sitter space, where the usual kinematic arguments do not work. We also comment on a possible relation between WGC and universal bounds on equilibration times. All in all, charged black holes in de Sitter should make haste to evaporate, but they should not rush it 2 .

In this note we observe that positive runaway potentials can generically be stabilized by abelian p-form fluxes, leading to parametrically controlled de Sitter solutions after compactification to a lower dimension. When compactifying from 4d to 2d the dS solutions are metastable, whereas all higher dimensional cases are unstable. The existence of these dS solutions require that a certain inequality involving the derivatives of the potential and p-form gauge coupling is satisfied. This inequality is not satisfied in simple stringy examples (outside of the scope of Maldacena-Nuñez), which unsurprisingly avoid this route to dS solutions. We can apply our techniques to construct dS 2 solutions in the Standard Model plus an additional runaway scalar such as quintessence. Demanding that these are avoided leads to (weak) phenomenological constraints on the time variation of the fine structure constant and QCD axion-photon coupling.

We analyse the ten-dimensional Einstein equations in the KKLT setting. We verify that the quartic gaugino term is needed to remove singularities in the on-shell action as suggested by Hamada et al. We contrast two approaches that have been taken in the literature when employing the effect of gaugino condensation in the ten-dimensional equations of motion. Here we follow the proposal to insert explicit non-zero fermion bilinar vev into the localised energy-momentum tensor of the 7-branes obtained from varying the 10d off-shell action with respect to the 10d metric. Our procedure is common in semi-classical physics and is manifestly local in 10d. However, it does not lead to the KKLT effective field theory. The alternative procedure of deriving the energy momentum tensor after replacing fermion bilinears by the gaugino vev, might be less well motivated in 10d, but reproduces the results of the KKLT effective field theory.