Related papers: The String Landscape and the Swampland
Progress in string theory has resulted in a whole landscape of vacua solutions.In this talk I describe a proposal for exploring the cosmological implications of the landscape, based on the dynamics of the wavefunction of the universe…
In this lecture I make some educated guesses, about the landscape of string theory vacua. Based on the recent work of a number of authors, it seems plausible that the lanscape is unimaginably large and diverse. Whether we like it or not,…
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…
We provide an overview of the string landscape and the Swampland program. Our review of the string landscape covers the worldsheet and spacetime perspectives, including vacua and string dualities. We then review and motivate the Swampland…
We give a brief overview of the string landscape and techniques used to construct string compactifications. We then explain how this motivates the notion of the swampland and review a number of conjectures that attempt to characterize…
We argue that the study of the statistics of the landscape of string vacua provides the first potentially predictive -- and also falsifiable -- framework for string theory. The question of whether the theory does or does not predict low…
Superstring theories are very promising theoretically, but the enormous landscape of string vacua and the (likely) very large underlying string scale imply that they may never be tested directly. Nevertheless, concrete constructions…
We posit the existence of the Marshland within string theory. This region is the boundary between the landscape of consistent low-energy limits of quantum gravity, and the swampland of theories that cannot be embedded within string theory…
The ``Swampland Program'' aims to discriminate consistent-looking effective field theories that do not admit a UV completion in quantum gravity from those that do. While most often developed under the umbrella of string theory, several…
There is evidence that string theory possesses a large discretuum of stable and/or metastable ground states, with zero or four supersymmetries in four dimensions. I discuss critically the nature of this evidence. Assuming this "landscape"…
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…
Identifying string theory vacua with desired physical properties at low energies requires searching through high-dimensional solution spaces - collectively referred to as the string landscape. We highlight that this search problem is…
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,…
In the recent times a lot of effort has been devoted to improve our knowledge about the space of string theory vacua (``the landscape'') to find statistical grounds to justify how and why the theory selects its vacuum. Particularly…
We make a number of conjectures about the geometry of continuous moduli parameterizing the string landscape. In particular we conjecture that such moduli are always given by expectation value of scalar fields and that moduli spaces with…
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 cosmological constant and electroweak hierarchy problem have been a great inspiration for research. Nevertheless, the resolution of these two naturalness problems remains mysterious from the perspective of a low-energy effective field…
We present evidence that the number of string/$M$ theory vacua consistent with experiments is a finite number. We do this both by explicit analysis of infinite sequences of vacua and by applying various mathematical finiteness theorems.
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…
Motivated by recent discussions of the string-theory landscape, we propose field-theoretic realizations of models with large numbers of vacua. These models contain multiple U(1) gauge groups, and can be interpreted as deconstructed versions…