The Swampland, Quintessence and the Vacuum Energy

Abstract

It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in the dark sector, induced by the evolving quintessence field. We note that cosmological models with varying couplings suffer from severe problems with quantum corrections, beyond those shared by all quintessence models. The vacuum energy depends on all masses and couplings of the theory, and even small variations of parameters can lead to overwhelmingly large corrections to the effective potential. We find that quintessence models with varying parameters can be realised in consistent quantum theories by either: 1) enforcing exceptional levels of fine-tuning; 2) realising some unknown mechanism that cancels all undesirable contributions to the effective potential with unprecedented accuracy; or 3) ensuring that the quintessence field couples exclusively to very light states, and does not backreact on heavy fields.

arXiv comment4p

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Cited by in corpus (49)

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• Bounds on Slow Roll at the Boundary of the Landscape
• Runaway Quintessence, Out of the Swampland
• Quintessence Saves Higgs Instability
• F-theory and Dark Energy
• Steep Eternal Inflation and the Swampland
• Pixelated Dark Energy
• The quantum swampland
• Hyperinflation generalised: from its attractor mechanism to its tension with the `swampland conjectures'
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• Electroweak relaxation of cosmological hierarchy
• The $F$-term Problem and other Challenges of Stringy Quintessence
• Dark Energy, the Swampland and the Equivalence Principle
• Hyperbolic field space and swampland conjecture for DBI scalar
• What does Inflation say about Dark Energy given the Swampland Conjectures?
• Cosmological implications of an interacting model of dark matter \& dark energy
• Multi-field Inflation in High-Slope Potentials
• Inflationary Dynamics and Swampland Criteria for Modified Gauss-Bonnet Gravity Compatible with GW170817
• Eternal Inflation, Entropy Bounds and the Swampland
• Strongly Coupled Quintessence
• Constraints on field flows of quintessence dark energy
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• Thermal Dark Energy
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• Swampland Criteria in the Slotheon Field Dark Energy
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• The Swampland and Screened Modified Gravity
• Swampland Criteria and Constraints on Inflation in a $f(R,T)$ Gravity Theory
• A model of dark matter dark energy interaction with some cosmic consequences
• Stability, dark energy parameterization and swampland aspect of Bianchi Type-$V{I}_h$ cosmological models with f(R, T)-gravity
• Forays into the dark side of the swamp
• Asymptotic bound on slow-roll parameter in stringy quintessence model
• Finite temperature effects in modular cosmology
• From Swampland to Phenomenology and Back
• Hidden Sectors in String Theory: Kinetic Mixings, Fifth Forces and Quintessence
• The Distribution of Vacua in Random Landscape Potentials
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Swampland: The Cosmologist's Handbook to the string-theoretical Swampland Programme
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• On the Occurrence of Finite-time Singularities in Swampland-related Quintessence Dark Energy Models