English

AdS and the Swampland

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-08-21 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study aspects of anti-de Sitter space in the context of the Swampland. In particular, we conjecture that the near-flat limit of pure AdS belongs to the Swampland, as it is necessarily accompanied by an infinite tower of light states. The mass of the tower is power-law in the cosmological constant, with a power of 12\frac{1}{2} for the supersymmetric case. We discuss relations between this behaviour and other Swampland conjectures such as the censorship of an unbounded number of massless fields, and the refined de Sitter conjecture. Moreover, we propose that changes to the AdS radius have an interpretation in terms of a generalised distance conjecture which associates a distance to variations of all fields. In this framework, we argue that the distance to the Λ0\Lambda \rightarrow 0 limit of AdS is infinite, leading to the light tower of states. We also discuss implications of the conjecture for de Sitter space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.05225,
  title  = {AdS and the Swampland},
  author = {Dieter Lust and Eran Palti and Cumrun Vafa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05225},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

8 pages. v2: fixed typos and added references

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:51:46.189Z