Universal isolation in the AdS landscape

TL;DR

This paper establishes universal criteria for non-perturbative stability of AdS vacua against bubble nucleation, validated through explicit string theory examples, and suggests potential universal features of such stability in the AdS landscape.

Contribution

It introduces a universal stability criterion for AdS vacua based on positive energy theorems and tests it in explicit string compactification models.

Findings

All BF-bound respecting critical points are non-perturbatively stable.

The stability criterion aligns with explicit string theory examples.

Potential universal features of AdS stability are proposed.

Abstract

We study the universal conditions for quantum non-perturbative stability against bubble nucleation for pertubatively stable AdS vacua based on positive energy theorems. We also compare our analysis with the pre-existing ones in the literature carried out within the thin-wall approximation. The aforementioned criterion is then tested in two explicit examples describing massive type IIA string theory compactified on $S^3$ and $S^3\,\times\,S^3$, respectively. The AdS landscape of both classes of compactifications is known to consist of a set of isolated points. The main result is that all critical points respecting the Breitenlohner-Freedaman (BF) bound also turn out be stable at a non-perturbative level. Finally, we speculate on the possible universal features that may be extracted from the above specific examples.