Putting the Swampland to Bed?

Senarath de Alwis of UC Boulder and the Racetrack / LARGE volume scenario gang of String cosmologists has written a paper that might finally close the book on Vafa’s infamous Swampland program. The program attempts to separate truly fundamental String Theory models from junk that would otherwise “look like” String Theory Models by hunting for easy, theoretical requirements. Despite a large amount of work by the community, the results are inconclusive at best.

To quote de Alwis’ abstract:

“We argue that radiative corrections below the Kaluza-Klein (KK) scale scale can result in a positive [Cosmological Constant (CC)]… though the string theory generated CC is negative, if some mild conditions on the spectrum of low energy fluctuations are satisfied. This would make the so-called deSitter (sic) swampland conjecture (even if true at a high scale) physically irrelevant.”