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 AdS 3 and AdS 4 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 AdS 3 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 AdS 3 solutions, and find that the vacua are stable within this approximation. Finally, we provide an initial investigation of the would-be dual CFT 2 s and CFT 3 s. We study roughly a dozen different models and find for all AdS 4 DGKT-type vacua that the dual operators to the lightest scalars have integer dimensions. For the putative CFT 2 dual theories of the AdS 3 vacua we find no integer dimensions for the operators.

Weak gravity versus scale separation

“…2 In the spirit of the swampland program, we will employ a bottom-up perspective and require that the magnetic weak gravity conjecture applies to any 1 See [10], for three-dimensional scale-separated Anti-de Sitter flux vacua recently constructed in type IIA. See also [11], 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 [18].…”

Snowmass White Paper: Bootstrapping String Theory

“…A scale-separated AdS solution exhibits a parametric hierarchy L AdS L M , where M comprises the internal dimensions of the string/M-theory compactification; the CFT dual of a putative scale-separated solution would contain a very sparse spectrum of single-trace operators with ∆ ∼ O(1), dual only to low-lying bulk "moduli" rather than Kaluza-Klein modes on M. (For preliminary work approaching this from the CFT perspective, see e.g. [151][152][153][154][155].) The scale separation question may be viewed as a refinement of the conjecture of [125] that specifies the number of large bulk dimensions in which the theory exhibits sub-AdS locality.…”

O6-plane backreaction on scale-separated Type IIA AdS$_3$ vacua

“…Due to the intricacies of the four-dimensional constructions that exhibit scale separation, a much simpler three-dimensional construction with scale separation and smeared sources was put forward in [30]. The main motivation behind such work is to use it as an accurate but simpler testing ground for the study of smeared sources, but also of other aspects of the swampland program [31][32][33]. In this work we go one step further and we apply the procedure proposed in [26] to the AdS 3 vacua of [30].…”