Crisis on Infinite Earths: Short-lived de Sitter Vacua in the String Theory Landscape

Abstract

We construct purely non-perturbative anti-de Sitter vacua in string theory which, on uplifting to a de Sitter (dS) one, have a decay time many orders of magnitude smaller than those of standard constructions, such as the KKLT and LVS scenarios. By virtue of being constructed purely from non-perturbative terms, these vacua avoids certain obstructions plaguing other constructions of dS in string theory. This results in a new class of phenomenological dS vacua in string theory with novel distinctive characteristics such as having two maxima. After examining whether these uplifted dS vacua obey the TCC, we revisit some old problems of realization of dS space as a vacuum. We find that not only is it phenomenologically hard to construct TCC-compatible vacua, but also inherent temporal dependences of the degrees of freedom generically arise in such constructions, amongst other issues. This reinforces the idea that dS, if it exists in string theory, should be a Glauber-Sudarshan state and not a vacuum.

The four-dimensional null energy condition as a swampland conjecture

“…Interestingly, once we sum up the trans-series associated with the nonlocal counter-terms, the result is a finite and local contribution that consistently solves the EOMs. These EOMs, in the language of the Glauber-Sudarshan state, are the Schwinger-Dyson's equations (see details in [33,34,51]).…”

de Sitter Space as a Glauber-Sudarshan State: II

“…The above choice is consistent with the way we have defined the volume of the eight-manifold by averaging in (3.49) and thus defines the non-locality function F (r) (yr+1 − yr) in a unique way in the limit (3.53). 28 This may be exemplified by the following. Let q = 4 in (3.42).…”

“…Thus exponentiation in (3.55) doesn't change the perturbative nature (thus also removing the −c k pieces from (3.55)). On the other hand, keeping d > 0 in (3.53) does create a genuine non-perturbative series because 28 : 27 The fact that x dependence comes from only Ho(y, x) helps us determine where the fixed slice may be placed. The point is, if we want the average value to coincide with the one got from the fixed slice, then it is easy to infer:…”

“…The more important question now is whether we gain any mileage from making the metric and the flux components to have toroidal fibre dependences. In [8] and [28] we where C n 3 l 1 ...l 5 are constant coefficients, the inverse metic components are used for complete contractions, and σ = n3 + 5 i=1 li with (n3, li) ∈ (Z, Z). We may note two things: one, that the above operator scales as…”

“…The constraint actually comes from anomaly cancellations and flux EOMs. In [7,8,28] we performed detailed computations for the case with a flat-slicing to show the non-existence of time-independent G-flux components. With generic slicing of de Sitter space, or with eleven-dimensional fibre dependences, this should be revisited to see whether some components of G-flux could remain time-independent.…”