Comments on classical AdS flux vacua with scale separation

TL;DR

This paper critically examines classical AdS flux vacua with scale separation, challenging recent conjectures, analyzing their stability, and exploring potential dual conformal field theories, with findings indicating inconsistencies and specific operator dimension patterns.

Contribution

The study refutes the refined AdS Distance Conjecture for certain AdS3 vacua, analyzes their non-perturbative stability, and investigates the properties of their dual CFTs, providing new insights into the Swampland constraints.

Findings

Refutes the refined AdS Distance Conjecture for AdS3 vacua.

Finds AdS4 DGKT-type vacua have dual operators with integer dimensions.

No integer operator dimensions found for AdS3 dual theories.

Abstract

AdS flux vacua with a parametric separation between the AdS and KK scales have been conjectured to be in the Swampland. We study flux compactifications of massive IIA supergravity with O6 planes which are claimed to allow moduli-stabilised and scale separated AdS$_3$ and AdS$_4$ vacua at arbitrary weak coupling and large volume. A recent refinement of the AdS Distance Conjecture is shown to be inconsistent with the class of AdS$_3$ vacua because the requisite discrete higher form symmetries are absent. We further perform a tree-level study of non-perturbative decays for the nonsupersymmetric versions of the AdS$_3$ solutions, and find that the vacua are stable within this approximation. Finally, we provide an initial investigation of the would-be dual CFT$_2$'s and CFT$_3$'s. We study roughly a dozen different models and find for all AdS$_4$ DGKT-type vacua that the dual operators to the lightest scalars have integer dimensions. For the putative CFT$_2$ dual theories of the AdS$_3$ vacua we find no integer dimensions for the operators.