Tachyonic Kaluza-Klein modes and the AdS swampland conjecture

Abstract We compute the Kaluza-Klein spectrum of the non-supersymmetric SO(3) × SO(3)-invariant AdS4 vacuum of 11-dimensional supergravity, whose lowest-lying Kaluza-Klein modes belong to a consistent truncation to 4-dimensional N $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 8 supergravity and are stable. We show that, none...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Emanuel Malek, Hermann Nicolai, Henning Samtleben
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2020-08-01
Series:Journal of High Energy Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP08(2020)159
Description
Summary:Abstract We compute the Kaluza-Klein spectrum of the non-supersymmetric SO(3) × SO(3)-invariant AdS4 vacuum of 11-dimensional supergravity, whose lowest-lying Kaluza-Klein modes belong to a consistent truncation to 4-dimensional N $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 8 supergravity and are stable. We show that, nonetheless, the higher Kaluza-Klein modes become tachyonic so that this non-supersymmetric AdS4 vacuum is perturbatively unstable within 11-dimensional supergravity. This represents the first example of unstable higher Kaluza-Klein modes and provides further evidence for the AdS swampland conjecture, which states that there are no stable non-supersymmetric AdS vacua within string theory. We also find 27 infinitesimal moduli amongst the Kaluza-Klein modes, which hints at the existence of a family of non-supersymmetric AdS4 vacua.
ISSN:1029-8479