Theory HEP Seminar

De Sitter Quantum Breaking, Swampland Conjectures and Thermal Strings

Ralph Blumenhagen

MPP, Munich

It is argued that under certain assumptions the quantum break time approach and the trans-Planckian censorship conjecture both lead to de Sitter swampland constraints of the same functional form. For that purpose we employ a proposal by Markkanen namely that quantum breaking of dS is induced by coarse graining via tracing over states beyond the dS horizon. This leads to a thermal matter component that can be generalized to string theory in an obvious way. Imposing a la Dvali-Gomez a censorship of quantum breaking, we recover the no eternal inflation bound in the low temperature regime, while the stronger bound from the dS swampland conjecture follows under a few reasonable assumptions about the still mysterious, presumably topological, high-temperature regime of string theory.