Related papers: Semi-classical stability of supergravity vacua
Witten has argued that in $2+1$ dimensions local supersymmetry can ensure the vanishing of the cosmological constant without requiring the equality of bose and fermi masses. We find that this mechanism is implemented in a novel fashion in…
We study the conditions under which a generic supergravity model involving chiral and vector multiplets can admit vacua with spontaneously broken supersymmetry and realistic cosmological constant. We find that the existence of such viable…
We analyze the moduli space of spontaneously broken N=8 supergravity theories in 4 dimensions with classical Minkowski vacua. We find that all the known classical vacua, as well as the several new ones we construct here, can be connected by…
The decay rates of metastable SQCD vacua in ISS-type models, both towards supersymmetric vacua as well as towards other nonsupersymmetric configurations arising in theories with elementary spectators, are estimated numerically in the…
We present further no-go theorems for classical de Sitter vacua in Type II string theory, i.e., de Sitter constructions that do not invoke non-perturbative effects or explicit supersymmetry breaking localized sources. By analyzing the…
We derive conditions for the existence of four-dimensional \N=1 supersymmetric flux vacua of massive type IIA string theory with general supergravity fluxes turned on. For an SU(3) singlet Killing spinor, we show that such flux vacua exist…
Minimal massive gravity in three dimensions propagates a single massive spin-2 mode around an AdS vacuum. It is distinguished by allowing for vacua with positive central charges of the asymptotic conformal algebra and a bulk graviton of…
We study ${\cal N}=1$ supergravity with $N>1$ chiral superfields in which one of the fields has a K\"ahler potential of exact no-scale type. Such systems admit de Sitter (dS) solutions in which supersymmetry is predominantly broken by the…
We discuss the general form of quadratic (1,1) supergravity in two dimensions, and show that this theory is equivalent to two scalar supermultiplets coupled to non-trivial supergravity. It is demonstrated that the theory possesses stable…
We establish the linear instability of the semiclassical Einstein-Klein-Gordon system linearised about the Minkowski vacuum spacetime. The proof relies on formulating a forcing problem for both metric and state perturbations within the…
We review the prospect of obtaining tree-level de Sitter (dS) vacua and slow-roll inflation models in string compactifications. Restricting ourselves to the closed string sector and assuming the absence of NSNS-sources, we classify the…
We give the general form of supersymmetric backgrounds with two real supercharges of M-theory and type IIA supergravity (with non-zero Romans mass in general) of the form $\mathbb{R}^{1,d} \times \M_8$, d=1,2, on eight-dimensional manifolds…
As a contribution to the current efforts to understand supersymmetry-breaking by meta-stable vacua, we study general properties of supersymmetry-breaking vacua in Wess-Zumino models: we show that tree-level degeneracy is generic, explore…
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in…
We explore perturbations about a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background in Chern-Simons gravity. At large momenta one of the two circularly polarized tensor modes becomes ghostlike. We argue that nevertheless the theory does not exhibit…
We study tadpole potentials of non-supersymmetric strings, resorting to a first-order formalism known in the literature as fake supersymmetry. We present a detailed analysis for vacua with only gravity and the dilaton, displaying the…
We perform a detailed analysis of the vacua of $\omega$-deformed SO(8) supergravity in four dimensions. In particular, using Tensorflow-based numerical methods, we track how the equilibria of the theory change when varying the…
We consider a family of globally stationary (horizonless), asymptotically flat solutions of five-dimensional supergravity. We prove that massless linear scalar waves in such soliton spacetimes cannot have a uniform decay rate faster than…
We study fully supersymmetric $AdS_6$ vacua of half-maxi\-mal $N=(1,1)$ gauged supergravity in six space-time dimensions coupled to $n$ vector multiplets. We show that the existence of $AdS_6$ backgrounds requires that the gauge group is of…
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…