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(16.11.) Connecting flux vacua with scalar field excursions
Vincent van Hemelryk (Uppsala)
16.11.2023 at 16:15
The Swampland program has been instrumental in finding out which EFTs cannot arise from quantum gravity. One of its interesting conjectures is the AdS distance conjecture, which says that as the AdS cosmological constant decreases, a tower of states becomes light, while its strong version rules out scale separation in string theory.
However, in the context of flux vacua, the cosmological constant is determined by discrete fluxes, and hence defining distances in a discrete landscape is still not a fully understood issue. This talk aims to address this by proposing a continuous method to interpolate between flux vacua with open-string scalar fields.
In this talk, I show how such flux vacua can be seen as different vacua in a single scalar potential of an enlarged field space. This observation also allows one to compute distances between different vacua using the usual field space metric.
First I will present a concise review of how this interpolation can be achieved within the DGKT setting, specifically with D-branes wrapping contractible cycles. Then I introduce a novel proposal, where thin domain walls as BPS D-branes, separating flux vacua, are resolved into thick domain walls as non-BPS branes. I will show how open-string tachyons of these non-BPS branes provide a way to interpolate between the flux vacua, and illustrate these ideas with some string theory examples.
Arnold Sommerfeld Center Theresienstrasse 37
Room 348 via ZOOM