Uplifting Runaways

Abstract

We find a mechanism by which antibranes placed in a warped deformed conifold throat can destroy the stabilization of the size of the sphere at the tip, collapsing it to zero size. This conifold destabilization mechanism can be avoided by turning on a large amount of flux on the sphere, but tadpole cancelation makes this incompatible with a hierarchy of scales in a Type IIB flux compactification. This indicates that antibrane uplift cannot be used to construct stable de Sitter vacua with a small cosmological constant in perturbative String Theory. The values of V and V′ for these KKLT‐like scenarios can be parametrically small, but we find that V′/V is still consistent with the de Sitter swampland conjecture. Our results also suggest that there should exist a Klebanov‐Strassler black hole, holographically dual to a deconfined phase with spontaneously broken chiral symmetry.

The Swampland: Introduction and Review

“…In a similar direction, the backreaction of the uplift on complex‐structure moduli was studied in []. In particular, in [] it was argued that keeping the complex‐structure modulus stable requires a minimum amount of flux, which is not allowed in type IIB but can be realized in the context of F‐theory (so including strongly coupled physics). In [] it was argued that the effective theory of KKLT may be problematic in the sense that there are Kaluza‐Klein modes in the throat which are lighter than the moduli which are in the KKLT effective theory.…”

AdS and the Swampland

“…Such towers may also be realised by KK or string modes in induced long throats near conifold loci, for example as discussed in[43,75] 10. This is in analogy to having a particle with negative, zero, or positive charge, such that these branches are separated by infinite distance in the field space of fields which control the gauge coupling 11.…”

Kähler moduli stabilization from ten dimensions

“…However, this does not necessarily mean that this effective field theory is the appropriate one, and/or whether there are missing light modes, as suggested both by swampland arguments [15], and by an explicit computation of the Laplacian in the warped throat [13]. Furthermore, taking into account the warp factor in the EFT for the complex structure moduli was shown to lead to a potential with a very different behavior than the constant-warp-factor potential [10]. The minima of the two potentials are the same, but their behaviors near the origin are completely different.…”