Winding uplifts and the challenges of weak and strong SUSY breaking in AdS

In flux compactifications of type IIB string theory with D3 and seven-branes, the negative induced D3 charge localized on seven-branes leads to an apparently pathological profile of the metric sufficiently close to the source. With the volume modulus stabilized in a KKLT de Sitter vacuum this pathological region takes over a significant part of the entire compactification, threatening to spoil the KKLT effective field theory. In this paper we employ the Seiberg-Witten solution of pure SU(N) super Yang-Mills theory to argue that wrapped seven-branes can be thought of as bound states of more microscopic exotic branes. We argue that the low-energy worldvolume dynamics of a stack of n such exotic branes is given by the (A1, An−1) Argyres-Douglas theory. Moreover, the splitting of the perturbative (in α′) seven-brane into its constituent branes at the non-perturbative level resolves the apparently pathological region close to the seven-brane and replaces it with a region of $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (1) Einstein frame volume. While this region generically takes up an $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (1) fraction of the compactification in a KKLT de Sitter vacuum we argue that a small flux superpotential dynamically ensures that the 4d effective field theory of KKLT remains valid nevertheless.

mentioning

confidence: 82%

Resolving spacetime singularities in flux compactifications & KKLT

Carta

Moritz

2021

“…Besides supersymmetric anti-de Sitter vacua, the two conjectures GMC and ADC make different predictions. Already in the case of non-supersymmetric anti-de Sitter backgrounds (despite being arguably unstable [46] -see also [47] for a recent work on supersymmetry breaking in anti-de Sitter space), the relation between the gravitino mass and the cosmological constant is not one-to-one, rather there is in general a lower bound…”

Section: The Gmc and The Anti-de Sitter Distance Conjecturementioning

confidence: 99%

The gravitino and the swampland

Cribiori

Lüst

Scalisi

2021

We propose a new swampland conjecture stating that the limit of vanishing gravitino mass corresponds to the massless limit of an infinite tower of states and to the consequent breakdown of the effective field theory. We test our proposal in large classes of models coming from compactification of string theory to four dimensions, where we identify the Kaluza-Klein nature of the tower of states becoming light. We point out a general relation between the gravitino mass and abelian gauge coupling in models with extended supersymmetry, which can survive also in examples with minimal supersymmetry. This allows us to connect our conjecture to other well established swampland conjectures, such as the weak gravity conjecture or the absence of global symmetries in quantum gravity. We discuss phenomenological implications of our conjecture in (quasi-)de Sitter backgrounds and extract a lower bound for the gravitino mass in terms of the Hubble parameter.

“…string theory has been the subject of many interesting studies recently, see e.g. [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. We will not address these issues, including the particularly critical 'singular bulk problem' [24], which derives from the 'throat-gluing problem' of [14] and was recently treated further in [28,29].…”

Section: Jhep11(2021)033mentioning

confidence: 99%

Completing the D7-brane local gaugino action

Hamada

Hebecker

Shiu

et al. 2021

Self Cite

Within the ongoing debate about de Sitter (dS) vacua in string theory, different aspects of explicit dS proposals have come under intense scrutiny. One key ingredient is D7-brane gaugino condensation, which is usually treated using effective 4d supergravity. However, it is clearly more desirable to derive the relevant scalar potential directly from a local 10d Lagrangian. Such a local 10d description captures the interactions among the various localized sources and the background fields which are smeared in the 4d Lagrangian. While progress in this endeavour has recently been made, some form of non-locality related to the 4-gaugino term has remained hidden in the available proposals. We spell out the local counterterm removing the divergence that arises when integrating out the 3-form flux and which, upon dimensional reduction, serves to reproduce the relevant part of the 4d supergravity action. This is both a step towards a more complete understanding of 10d type-IIB supergravity as well as specifically towards better control of dS constructions in string theory involving gaugino condensation.