English

The cosmological constant and the weak gravity conjecture

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-04-05 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We examine the descent via membrane nucleation through a landscape of vacua where the cosmological constant is given by a combination of four-form fluxes. It has been shown that this descent can be slowed exponentially for very low curvature vacua close to Minkowski space in a wide class of models satisfying certain parametric conditions, providing a possible solution to the cosmological constant problem. We explore in detail whether or not those parametric conditions are compatible with the membrane weak gravity conjecture. Whilst it is true that there is often tension, we show that this is not always the case and present an explicit model where Minkowski space is absolutely stable and the weak gravity conjecture is satisfied. This corresponds to an extension of the Bousso-Polchinski model into a generalised DBI action for four-forms. We also clarify how the landscape should be populated in a consistent model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.02961,
  title  = {The cosmological constant and the weak gravity conjecture},
  author = {Yang Liu and Antonio Padilla and Francisco G. Pedro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.02961},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

22 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:43:22.144Z