Comments on classical AdS flux vacua with scale separation

Abstract

AdS flux vacua with a parametric separation between the AdS and KK scales have been conjectured to be in the Swampland. We study flux compactifications of massive IIA supergravity with O6 planes which are claimed to allow moduli-stabilised and scale separated AdS3 and AdS4 vacua at arbitrary weak coupling and large volume. A recent refinement of the AdS Distance Conjecture is shown to be inconsistent with this class of AdS3 vacua because the requisite discrete higher form symmetries are absent. We further perform a tree-level study of non-perturbative decays for the nonsupersymmetric versions of the AdS3 solutions, and find that the vacua are stable within this approximation. Finally, we provide an initial investigation of the would-be dual CFT2s and CFT3s. We study roughly a dozen different models and find for all AdS4 DGKT-type vacua that the dual operators to the lightest scalars have integer dimensions. For the putative CFT2 dual theories of the AdS3 vacua we find no integer dimensions for the operators.

Type IIB flux compactifications with h1,1 = 0

“…We note that the masses squared above again give rise to dual conformal dimensions ∆ = {10, 8, 6, 2 or 1} that are all integers. This was previously noticed for nonsupersymmetric DGKT solutions in [49,51] and it would be interesting to extend the general analysis of [52] to non-supersymmetric AdS vacua.…”

“…are integers as well [49,51,52]. This fascinating feature of this family of AdS vacua currently awaits an explanation and we check below in our other families whether the same is true or not.…”

“…Second, the most widely studied AdS vacua in string theory are of Freund-Rubin type [55,56] or exhibit similar features, by which we mean that the size of the internal space R KK is not parametrically smaller than R AdS . This property was recently studied for example in [51,[57][58][59][60][61][62][63] and has led to the AdS distance conjecture [53] that states that for infinite families of AdS vacua with V AdS → 0, there exist a tower of massive states with masses that satisfy m tower ∼ |V AdS | α for some positive JHEP06(2022)166 α of order one. The strong version of this conjecture says that supersymmetric AdS vacua α = 1/2.…”

Metastable vacua from torsion and machine learning

“…The refined dS conjecture establishes that the minima of the scalar potential coming from the dimensional reduction of the low energy theory in string theory have to be AdS otherwise they are tachyonic or not consistent to Quantum Gravity, at least in the asymptotic regions of moduli space [4][5][6][7][8]. Even more restrictive, the AdS conjecture establishes that the scale of the lightest moduli is not parametrically separated from the AdS scale, and thus any attempt to uplift an AdS to a dS vacuum shall result in their destabilization 1 .…”

Weak gravity versus scale separation

“…See instead[12], for three-dimensional scaleseparated Anti-de Sitter flux vacua recently constructed in type IIA. See also[13], for more comments on various properties of these three-and four-dimensional Anti-de Sitter type IIA vacua in relation to swampland conjectures.2 Notably, an argument connecting weak gravity to scale separation appeared already in the original paper[20].…”