de Sitter Vacua in the Swampland Era

 Dr. Pablo SOLER GOMIS
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Heidelberg University


10 September 2019 (Tuesday)
2:00 pm
IAS4042, 4/F, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST

A series of conjectures have been recently proposed to distinguish effective field theories that can be consistently coupled to quantum gravity from those which cannot. The latter do not arise as low energy limits of string compactifications and are said to live in the Swampland. The most recent of the swampland conjectures argues that theories of quantum gravity with de Sitter (dS) minima are inconsistent. If correct, it would imply that well known dS constructions in string theory (e.g. the KKLT (Kachru, Kallosh, Linde and Trivedi, 2003) and the Large Volume Scenarios) are secretly pathological. In this talk, the speaker will review some motivations behind the no-dS swampland conjecture and discuss recent insights on the consistency of the KKLT scenario.