Supersymmetry Breaking and Stability in String Vacua: brane dynamics, bubbles and the swampland

Abstract

We review some aspects of the dramatic consequences of supersymmetry breaking on string vacua. In particular, we focus on the issue of vacuum stability in ten-dimensional string models with broken, or without, supersymmetry, whose perturbative spectra are free of tachyons. After formulating the models at stake, we introduce their unified low-energy effective description and present a number of vacuum solutions to the classical equations of motion. In addition, we present a generalization of previous no-go results for de Sitter vacua in warped flux compactifications. Then we analyze the classical and quantum stability of these vacua, studying linearized field fluctuations and bubble nucleation. Then, we describe how the resulting instabilities can be framed in terms of brane dynamics, examining in particular brane interactions, back-reacted geometries and commenting on a brane-world string construction along the lines of a recent proposal. After providing a summary, we conclude with some perspectives on possible future developments.

106 pages, to appear in La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento. v2: references added. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1908.04352

References in corpus (18)

• On the Geometry of the String Landscape and the Swampland
• The Swampland: Introduction and Review
• Inflationary Constraints on Type IIA String Theory
• Towards a Non-Supersymmetric String Phenomenology
• de Sitter Space in Non-Critical String Theory
• Statistical analysis of the supersymmetry breaking scale
• Nonperturbative Instability of AdS_5 x S^5/Z_k
• String Solitons and T-duality
• On Climbing Scalars in String Theory
• Understanding KKLT from a 10d perspective
• Open problems on classical de Sitter solutions
• Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape
• Bubbles of Nothing in Flux Compactifications
• On the Low Energy Spectra of the Nonsupersymmetric Heterotic String Theories
• Tachyonic Kaluza-Klein modes and the AdS swampland conjecture
• String Perturbation Theory Around Dynamically Shifted Vacuum
• Tadpole Resummations in String Theory
• QCD, Flavor, and the de Sitter Swampland

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Asymptotic Safety: Swampland or Wonderland?
• Relative scale separation in orbifolds of $S^2$ and $S^5$