A domain wall bound on anti-de Sitter vacua

TL;DR

This paper derives an upper bound on the AdS radius from flux-changing domain walls, linking it to the gravitino mass and supporting swampland conjectures, with tests on various vacua models.

Contribution

It introduces the domain wall bound, connecting domain wall tension to the AdS radius and gravitino mass, providing new constraints on scale hierarchies in string vacua.

Findings

Classical flux vacua and LVS satisfy the bound.

Racetrack and KKLT-like vacua face constraints on scale hierarchies.

The bound supports the gravitino and AdS distance conjectures.

Abstract

We consider anti-de Sitter flux vacua interpolated by flux-changing domain walls. Demanding that the tension of such a domain wall be above the ultraviolet cutoff of the effective description, we derive an upper bound on the anti-de Sitter radius, which we term domain wall bound. It translates into a lower bound on the gravitino mass, thus realizing the gravitino conjecture and the anti-de Sitter distance conjecture of the swampland program. We test the domain wall bound on several examples with a candidate hierarchy of scales: classical flux vacua, racetrack models, LVS and KKLT-like anti-de Sitter vacua. The classical flux vacua and LVS are found to be compatible with the bound. For racetrack and KKLT-like anti-de Sitter vacua, the bound poses a non-trivial constraint on achieving large hierarchies of scales.