A New de Sitter Solution with a Weakly Warped Deformed Conifold

TL;DR

This paper finds a new metastable de Sitter solution in type IIB flux compactifications with a weakly warped deformed conifold, expanding the understanding of moduli stabilization and the string landscape.

Contribution

It introduces a novel metastable de Sitter solution by analyzing the regime of weak warping, where the coupling between moduli is subdominant, differing from previous strong warping assumptions.

Findings

Discovered a new metastable de Sitter vacuum in the weakly warped regime.

Showed that the coupling between conifold and volume moduli can be subdominant.

Discussed implications for the string theory landscape and swampland.

Abstract

We revisit moduli stabilisation for type IIB flux compactifications that include a warped throat region corresponding to a warped deformed conifold, with an anti-D3-brane sitting at its tip. The warping induces a coupling between the conifold's deformation modulus and the bulk volume modulus in the K\"ahler potential. Previous works have studied the scalar potential assuming a strong warping such that this coupling term dominates, and found that the anti-D3-brane uplift may destabilise the conifold modulus and/or volume modulus, unless flux numbers within the throat are large, which makes tadpole cancellation a challenge. We explore the regime of parameter space corresponding to a weakly-but-still warped throat, such that the coupling between the conifold and volume moduli is subdominant. We thus discover a new metastable de Sitter solution within the four-dimensional effective field theory. We discuss the position of this de Sitter vacuum in the string theory landscape and swampland.