In this paper we study non-perturbative instabilities in Anti de-Sitter vacua arising from flux compactifications of string models with broken supersymmetry. In the semi-classical limit, these processes drive the vacua towards lower fluxes, which translate into higher curvatures and higher string couplings. In order to shed some light on this regime, we provide evidence for a description in terms of branes, which generate near-horizon AdS throats. To this end, we study the attractor properties of the geometries near the throat, and we also characterize their asymptotics away from it. We also describe the instability within a probe-brane picture, finding an agreement between low-energy (super)gravity and brane instanton estimates of the decay rates.

We study the perturbative stability of four settings that arise in String Theory, when dilaton potentials accompany the breaking of Supersymmetry, in the tachyon-free U Sp(32) and U (32) orientifold models, and also in the heterotic SO(16) × SO(16) model. The first two settings are a family of AdS 3 ×S 7 vacua of the orientifold models and a family of AdS 7 ×S 3 vacua of the heterotic model, supported by form fluxes, with small world-sheet and string-loop corrections within wide ranges of parameters. In both cases we find some unstable scalar perturbations, as a result of mixings induced by fluxes, confirming for the first class of vacua a previous result. However, in the second class of vacua they only affect the = 1 modes, so that a Z 2 projection induced by an overall parity in the internal space suffices to eliminate them, leading to perturbative stability. Moreover, the constant dilaton profiles of these vacua allow one to extend the analysis to generic potentials, thus exploring the possible effects of higher-order corrections, and we exhibit wide nearby regions of perturbative stability. The solutions in the third setting have nine-dimensional Poincaré symmetry. They include regions with large world-sheet or string-loop corrections, but we show that these vacua have no perturbative instabilities. Finally, the last setting concerns cosmological solutions in ten dimensions where the "climbing" phenomenon takes place: they have bounded string-loop corrections but large world-sheet ones close to the initial singularity. In this case we find that perturbations generally decay, but homogeneous tensor modes exhibit an interesting logarithmic growth that signals a breakdown of isotropy. If the Universe then proceeds to lower dimensions, milder potentials from other branes force all perturbations to remain bounded.

We study de Sitter configurations in ten-dimensional string models where supersymmetry is either absent or broken at the string scale. To this end, we derive expressions for the cosmological constant in general warped flux compactifications with localized sources, which yield no-go theorems that extend previous works on supersymmetric cases. We frame our results within a dimensional reduction and connect them to a number of Swampland conjectures, corroborating them further in the absence of supersymmetry. Furthermore, we construct a top-down string embedding of de Sitter brane-world cosmologies within unstable anti-de Sitter landscapes, providing a concrete realization of a recently revisited proposal.

We investigate interactions between branes of various dimensions, both charged and uncharged, in three non-supersymmetric string models. These include the USp(32) and U(32) orientifold projections of the type IIB and type 0B strings, as well as the SO(16)×SO(16) projection of the exceptional heterotic string. The resulting ten-dimensional spectra are free of tachyons, and the combinations of branes that they contain give rise to rich and varied dynamics. We compute static potentials for parallel stacks of branes in three complementary regimes: the probe regime, in which one of the two stacks is parametrically heavier than the other, the string-amplitude regime, in which both stacks are light, and the holographic regime. Whenever comparisons are possible, we find qualitative agreement despite the absence of supersymmetry. For charged branes, our analysis reveals that the Weak Gravity Conjecture is satisfied in a novel way via a renormalization of the effective charge-to-tension ratio.

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