Holographic Constraints on the String Landscape

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that holography imposes significant constraints on scalar potentials in the string landscape, ruling out many proposed models of stable AdS and de Sitter vacua by linking potential features to dual CFT properties and the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture.

Contribution

It introduces holographic consistency conditions that restrict scalar potentials in string theory, challenging existing models like DGKT and KKLT for realizing stable vacua.

Findings

Holography constrains scalar potential asymptotics.

Certain potential shapes are incompatible with a dual CFT.

The constraints exclude popular scale-separated AdS and dS models.

Abstract

We show that holography imposes strong and general constraints on scalar field potentials in the string landscape, determined by the asymptotic structure of the underlying spacetime. Applying these holographic consistency conditions, we identify broad classes of scalar potentials that are incompatible with a well-defined dual description. These include potentials with extended plateaus, excessively steep or shallow asymptotics, certain zero crossings, and specific alignments of stable AdS minima in moduli space. In particular, making the standard assumption that the CFT dual to a stable AdS vacuum must be realized as a worldvolume theory of a brane in string theory, we show that the brane selects an infinite-distance limit in moduli space where parametric scale separation is forbidden. Furthermore, the steepness and positivity of the potential are restricted in that infinite distance direction. We also find that requiring the validity of the effective theory in the future vacuum, a natural holographic criterion, automatically enforces the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) for classical cosmological solutions with positive potentials. Taken together, these constraints exclude the leading proposals to realize scale-separated AdS vacua and metastable de Sitter vacua in the string theory landscape such as DGKT and KKLT.