Related papers: Swampland Conjectures and Cosmological Expansion
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…
Our current best guess for a unified theory of gravitation and quantum field theory (string theory) generically predicts a set of requirements for a consistently quantized theory, the Swampland criteria. Refined versions of these criteria…
String theory has strong implications for cosmology: it tells us that we cannot have a cosmological constant, that single-field slow-roll inflation is ruled out, and that black holes decay. We elucidate the origin of these statements within…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
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 transcendental expectation of string theory is that the nature of the fundamental forces, particle spectra and masses, together with coupling constants, is uniquely determined by mathematical and logical consistency, non-empirically,…
We consider quintessence models within 4D effective descriptions of gravity coupled to two scalar fields. These theories are known to give rise to viable models of late-time cosmic acceleration without any need for flat potentials, and so…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…
The First and Second Swampland Conjectures (FSC & SSC) are substantially modified in non-critical string cosmology, in which cosmic time is identified with the time-like Liouville mode of the supercritical string. In this scenario the…
The idea that the cosmological term, Lambda, should be a time dependent quantity in cosmology is a most natural one. It is difficult to conceive an expanding universe with a strictly constant vacuum energy density, namely one that has…
In this Letter, we study the implications of string Swampland criteria for dark energy in view of ongoing and future cosmological observations. If string theory should be the ultimate quantum gravity theory, there is evidence that exact de…
We consider new cosmological solutions with a collapsing, an intermediate and an expanding phase. The boundary between the expanding (collapsing) phase and the intermediate phase is seen by comoving observers as a cosmological past (future)…
The string theory swampland proposes that there is no UV-completion for an effective field theory with an exact (metastable) de Sitter vacua, thereby ruling out standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology if the conjecture is taken seriously. The…
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…
We study constraints imposed by two proposed string Swampland criteria on cosmology. These criteria involve an upper bound on the range traversed by scalar fields as well as a lower bound on $|\nabla_{\phi} V|/V$ when $V >0$. We find that…
I conjecture an upper bound on the number of possible swampland conjectures by comparing the entropy required by the conjectures themselves to the Beckenstein-Hawking entropy of the cosmological horizon. Assuming of order 100 kilobits of…
The Swampland Distance Conjecture claims that effective theories derived from a consistent theory of quantum gravity only have a finite range of validity. This will imply drastic consequences for string theory model building. The refined…
We consider spacetime-dependent solutions to string theory models with tadpoles for dynamical fields, arising from non-trivial scalar potentials. The solutions have necessarily finite extent in spacetime, and are capped off by boundaries at…
We explore the possibility that our universe's current accelerated expansion is explained by a quintessence model with an exponential scalar potential, $V =V_0\, e^{-\lambda\, \phi}$, keeping an eye towards $\lambda \geq \sqrt{2}$ and an…
Asymptotic (late-time) cosmology depends on the asymptotic (infinite-distance) limits of scalar field space in string theory. Such limits feature an exponentially decaying potential $V \sim \exp(- c \phi)$ with corresponding Hubble scale $H…