A no-go theorem for accelerating cosmologies from M-theory compactifications

TL;DR

This paper proves a no-go theorem showing that certain M-theory compactifications cannot produce late-time accelerating universes with future event horizons, highlighting limitations in string/M-theory cosmological models.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous proof of Townsend's conjecture for warped compactifications with a single scalar modulus, constraining possible cosmological solutions from M-theory.

Findings

No late-time acceleration with future horizons in the considered models

Limits the types of cosmologies achievable via M-theory compactifications

Supports the idea that string/M-theory may not describe accelerating universes with horizons

Abstract

It is known that four-dimensional cosmologies exhibiting transient phases of acceleration can be obtained by compactifications of low-energy effective string or M-theory on time-varying manifolds. In the four-dimensional theory, the acceleration can be attributed to a quintessential scalar field with a positive effective potential. Recently, Townsend has conjectured that the potentials obtained by such compactifications cannot give rise to late-time accelerating universes which possess future event horizons. Such a `no-go' result would be desirable, since current string or M-theory seems unable to provide an adequate description of space-times with future event horizons. In this letter, we provide a proof of this conjecture for a class of warped compactifications with a single scalar modulus parametrising the volume of the compactification manifold.