The String Landscape, the Swampland, and the Missing Corner

Abstract

We give a brief overview of the string landscape and techniques used to construct string compactifications. We then explain how this motivates the notion of the swampland and review a number of conjectures that attempt to characterize theories in the swampland. We also compare holography in the context of superstrings with the similar, but much simpler case of topological string theory. For topological strings, there is a direct definition of topological gravity based on a sum over a "quantum gravitational foam." In this context, holography is the statement of an identification between a gravity and gauge theory, both of which are defined independently of one another. This points to a missing corner in string dualities which suggests the search for a direct definition of quantum theory of gravity rather than relying on its strongly coupled holographic dual as an adequate substitute (Based on TASI 2017 lectures given by C. Vafa).

References in corpus (4)

• The String Landscape and the Swampland
• Testing the Weak Gravity -- Cosmic Censorship Connection
• Weak Gravity Conjecture, Multiple Point Principle and the Standard Model Landscape
• Constraining the EW Hierarchy from the Weak Gravity Conjecture

Cited by in corpus (59)

• On the Cosmological Implications of the String Swampland
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• Festina Lente: EFT Constraints from Charged Black Hole Evaporation in de Sitter
• Instantons and infinite distances
• A Holographic Derivation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Bounds on Slow Roll at the Boundary of the Landscape
• New constraints on classical de Sitter: flirting with the swampland
• Avoiding the string swampland in single-field inflation: Excited initial states
• Trans-Planckian censorship, inflation and excited initial states for perturbations
• A 10d view on the KKLT AdS vacuum and uplifting
• Thermodynamics of 4D Dilatonic Black Holes and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Baby Universes, Holography, and the Swampland
• A Gravitino Distance Conjecture
• Supersymmetric Protection and the Swampland
• The trans-Planckian censorship conjecture from the swampland distance conjecture
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• The Fundamental Need for a SM Higgs and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Machine learning for complete intersection Calabi-Yau manifolds: a methodological study
• Large Field Inflation/Quintessence and the Refined Swampland Distance Conjecture
• Relating the scalar weak gravity conjecture and the swampland distance conjecture for an accelerating universe
• A New Spin on the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Swampland Conditions for Higher Derivative Couplings from CFT
• Inflation, Higher Spins and the Swampland
• A dS obstruction and its phenomenological consequences
• Swampland, Trans-Planckian Censorship and Fine-Tuning Problem for Inflation: Tunnelling Wavefunction to the Rescue
• Theta-problem and the String Swampland
• Minimal Supergravity Inflation without Slow Gravitino
• Moduli spaces of Calabi-Yau $d$-folds as gravitational-chiral instantons
• Model Independent Analysis of Supernova Data, Dark Energy, Trans-Planckian Censorship and the Swampland
• Swampland geometry and the gauge couplings
• Contracting Cosmologies and the Swampland
• Inflation, Gravity Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking, and de Sitter Vacua in Supergravity with a Kähler-Invariant FI Term
• A Note on the dS Swampland Conjecture, Non-BPS branes and K-theory
• Analytic Periods via Twisted Symmetric Squares
• A CFT Distance Conjecture
• Compact objects and the swampland
• Note on initial conditions for small-field inflation
• Limitations of an Effective Field Theory Treatment of Early Universe Cosmology
• Geometric flow equations for the number of space-time dimensions
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• A comment on no-force conditions for black holes and branes
• Trans-Planckian censorship constraints on properties and cosmological applications of axion-like fields
• Types of gauge groups in six-dimensional F-theory on double covers of rational elliptic 3-folds
• Infinite Distance Limits and Information Theory
• The Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture in different frameworks of viable inflation
• The Effective Potential Originating from Swampland and the Non-trivial Brans-Dicke Coupling
• Topological susceptibility and information theory
• A Brief Summary Of Global Anomaly Cancellation In Six-Dimensional Supergravity
• Global aspects of moduli spaces of 2d SCFTs
• The four-dimensional null energy condition as a swampland conjecture
• String theory landscape and cosmological constant
• Component Actions of Liberated $\mathcal{N}=1$ Supergravity and New Fayet-Iliopoulos Terms in Superconformal Tensor Calculus
• Towards an explicit model of large field inflation
• Comments on Brane Recombination, Finite Flux Vacua, and the Swampland
• A Tale of Two $U(1)$'s: Kinetic Mixing from Lattice WGC States
• Dynamical Tadpoles and Weak Gravity Constraints