The Fall of Stringy de Sitter
Andrew R. Frey, Matthew Lippert, Brook Williams

TL;DR
This paper examines the stability of string theory-based de Sitter vacua, revealing that certain decay processes, especially NS5-brane mediated ones, can be rapid, challenging their long-term metastability.
Contribution
It analyzes decay channels of stringy de Sitter vacua, highlighting the impact of flux choices and identifying fast decay mechanisms.
Findings
Discrete flux choices create closely-spaced vacua.
NS5-brane mediated decays can be very fast.
Many decay channels lead to rapid vacuum decay.
Abstract
Kachru, Kallosh, Linde, & Trivedi recently constructed a four-dimensional de Sitter compactification of IIB string theory, which they showed to be metastable in agreement with general arguments about de Sitter spacetimes in quantum gravity. In this paper, we describe how discrete flux choices lead to a closely-spaced set of vacua and explore various decay channels. We find that in many situations NS5-brane meditated decays which exchange NSNS 3-form flux for D3-branes are comparatively very fast.
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