Stability, Tunneling and Flux Changing de Sitter Transitions in the Large Volume String Scenario

TL;DR

This paper investigates the non-perturbative stability of the Large Volume Scenario in IIB string compactifications, analyzing various decay mechanisms of de Sitter and Anti-de Sitter vacua, and comparing with other string models.

Contribution

It provides explicit decay rate formulas for LVS vacua and compares stability features across different string compactification scenarios.

Findings

LVS AdS minima are stable despite non-supersymmetry.

Decay rates depend exponentially on the volume.

Transitions to decompactification are exponentially more probable.

Abstract

We study the non-perturbative stability of the Large Volume Scenario (LVS) of IIB string compactifications, by analysing transitions mediated by the Brown-Teitelboim (BT) brane nucleations and by Coleman De Luccia tunneling (CDL). We find that, as long as the effective field theory description holds, the LVS AdS minima are stable despite being non-supersymmetric. This opens the possibility of having a CFT dual. Metastable de Sitter vacua behave differently depending on the uplifting mechanism. We find explicit expressions for the different decay rates in terms of exponentials of the volume. Among the transitions of dS to dS those with increasing volume and decreasing vacuum energy are preferred, though dS decays to AdS (big-crunch sinks) have higher probability. However, the probability of transitions via the CDL mechanism to decompactification are exponentially much larger compared to these. The BT decays correspond to flux/D3 brane transitions mediated by the nucleation of D5/NS5 branes. We compare our results with previous analysis for KKLT, type IIA, and 6D Einstein-Maxwell studies. In particular we find no indication for a bubble of nothing decay.