Quantum Breaking Bound on de Sitter and Swampland

Dvali, Gia; Gomez, Cesar und Zell, Sebastian (2019): Quantum Breaking Bound on de Sitter and Swampland. In: Fortschritte der Physik-Progress of Physics, Bd. 67, Nr. 1-2, 1800094

Abstract

Quantum consistency suggests that any de Sitter patch that lasts a number of Hubble times that exceeds its Gibbons-Hawking entropy divided by the number of light particle species suffers an effect of quantum breaking. Inclusion of other interactions makes the quantum break-time shorter. The requirement that this must not happen puts severe constraints on scalar potentials, essentially suppressing the self-reproduction regimes. In particular, it eliminates both local and global minima with positive energy densities and imposes a general upper bound on the number of e-foldings in any given Hubble patch. Consequently, maxima and other tachyonic directions must be curved stronger than the corresponding Hubble parameter. We show that the key relations of the recently-proposed de Sitter swampland conjecture follow from the de Sitter quantum breaking bound. We give a general derivation and also illustrate this on a concrete example of D-brane inflation. We can say that string theory as a consistent theory of quantum gravity nullifies a positive vacuum energy in self-defense against quantum breaking.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Physik
• Themengebiete: 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik > 530 Physik
• ISSN: 0015-8208
• Sprache: Englisch