Supersymmetry Breaking Warped Throats and the Weak Gravity Conjecture

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new swampland conjecture that forbids stable non-supersymmetric warped throats, impacting models of supersymmetry breaking and de Sitter uplift in string theory.

Contribution

It introduces a novel swampland criterion against stable non-supersymmetric locally AdS warped throats, extending previous bounds on non-supersymmetric vacua.

Findings

Rules out large classes of warped throats with supersymmetry breaking.

Reinterprets instabilities in fractional D3-brane systems.

Identifies new decay mechanisms in non-supersymmetric backgrounds.

Abstract

We generalize the swampland criterion forbidding stable non-supersymmetric AdS vacua and propose a new swampland conjecture forbidding stable non-supersymmetric "locally AdS" warped throats. The conjecture is motivated by the properties of systems of fractional D3-branes at singularities, and can be used to rule out large classes of warped throats with supersymmetry breaking ingredients, and their possible application to de Sitter uplift. In particular, this allows to reinterpret the runaway instabilities of the gravity dual of fractional branes in the dP$_1$ theory, and to rule out warped throats with Dynamical Supersymmetry Breaking D-brane sectors at their bottom. We also discuss the instabilities of warped throats with supersymmetry broken by the introduction of anti-orientifold planes. These examples lead to novel decay mechanisms in explicit non-supersymmetric examples of locally AdS warped throats, and also of pure AdS backgrounds.