The FL bound and its phenomenological implications

TL;DR

This paper refines the Festina Lente bound on charged particles in de Sitter space, explores its extensions, and discusses its implications for particle physics, cosmology, and string theory constructions, including the Higgs potential and anti-brane scenarios.

Contribution

It fixes the constant in the FL bound, extends it to higher dimensions and scalar potentials, and analyzes its phenomenological and theoretical implications.

Findings

Fixed the order-one constant in the FL bound.

Extended the FL bound to higher dimensions and scalar potentials.

Implications for Higgs potential and anti-brane uplift scenarios.

Abstract

Demanding that charged Nariai black holes in (quasi-)de Sitter space decay without becoming super-extremal implies a lower bound on the masses of charged particles, known as the Festina Lente (FL) bound. In this paper we fix the $\mathcal{O}(1)$ constant in the bound and elucidate various aspects of it, as well as extensions to $d>4$ and to situations with scalar potentials and dilatonic couplings. We also discuss phenomenological implications of FL including an explanation of why the Higgs potential cannot have a local minimum at the origin, thus explaining why the weak force must be broken. For constructions of meta-stable dS involving anti-brane uplift scenarios, even though the throat region is consistent with FL, the bound implies that we cannot have any light charged matter fields coming from any far away region in the compactified geometry, contrary to the fact that they are typically expected to arise in these scenarios. This strongly suggests that introduction of warped anti-branes in the throat cannot be decoupled from the bulk dynamics as is commonly assumed. Finally, we provide some evidence that in certain situations the FL bound can have implications even with gravity decoupled and illustrate this in the context of non-compact throats.