Related papers: The quantum swampland
Recently a swampland criterion has been proposed that rules out de Sitter vacua in string theory. Such a criterion should hold at all points in the field space and especially at points where the system is on-shell. However there has not…
There have been many attempts to construct de Sitter space-times in string theory. While arguably there have been some successes, this has proven challenging, leading to the de Sitter swampland conjecture: quantum theories of gravity do not…
The Swampland program aims to distinguish effective theories which can be completed into quantum gravity in the ultraviolet from those which cannot. This article forms an introduction to the field, assuming only a knowledge of quantum field…
De Sitter solutions have been recently conjectured to be incompatible with quantum gravity. In this paper we critically assess the progress and challenges of different mechanisms to obtain de Sitter vacua in string compactifications and…
The de Sitter conjecture yields a severe bound on possible vacua for a consistent quantum gravity. We extend the de Sitter conjecture by taking into account dynamics of the scalar field. We then apply such an extended de Sitter conjecture…
The swampland is the set of seemingly consistent low-energy effective field theories that cannot be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. In this review we cover some of the conjectural properties that effective theories should possess…
It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in…
The swampland conjectures seek to distinguish effective field theories which can be consistently embedded in a theory of quantum gravity from those which can not (and are hence referred to as being in the swampland). We consider two such…
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…
Recently, various swampland conjectures have been proposed that every UV complete effective field theory should satisfy. In particular, these deal with the properties of AdS and dS solutions arising in theories of quantum gravity. Mainly…
Swampland conjectures are a set of proposed necessary conditions for a low-energy effective field theory to have a UV completion inside a theory of quantum gravity. Swampland conjectures have interesting phenomenological consequences, and…
Motivated by the early discovery of the gigantic landscape of string theory vacua, in recent years people switched direction to try to find constraints on low energy effective field theories from UV-complete descriptions for example quantum…
Among Swampland conditions, the distance conjecture characterizes the geometry of scalar fields and the de Sitter conjecture constrains allowed potentials on it. We point out a connection between the distance conjecture and a refined…
We point out that the swampland conjectures, forbidding the presence of global symmetries and (meta-)stable de Sitter vacua within quantum gravity, pick up a dynamical axion for the electroweak SU(2) gauge theory as a natural candidate for…
Recent developments in string theory suggest that string theory landscape of vacua is vast. It is natural to ask if this landscape is as vast as allowed by consistent-looking effective field theories. We use universality ideas from string…
We argue that if de Sitter space is indeed represented by a finite dimensional quantum system, then semi-classical considerations, combined with the fundamental principles of quantum measurement theory, imply that any theoretical model of…
Recently proposed de Sitter Swampland conjectures imply non-trivial constraints on a scalar field potential in any effective field theory that admits a quantum gravity completion. The original conjecture apparently excludes many…
For any quasi de Sitter background, we show that a recently proposed scalar weak gravity conjecture (sWGC) follows from the swampland distance conjecture, together with the covariant entropy bound. While pointing out the limitations of our…
The Euclidean or Bunch-Davies O(4,1) invariant 'vacuum' state of quantum fields in global de Sitter space is shown to be unstable to small perturbations, even for a massive free field with no self-interactions. There are perturbations of…
We discuss the cosmological implications of the string swampland conjectures for late-time cosmology, and test them against a wide range of state of the art cosmological observations. The refined de Sitter conjecture constrains either the…