Vacua Morghulis

TL;DR

The authors conjecture that all string vacua decay, with non-supersymmetric Minkowski/AdS vacua metastable, supersymmetric vacua marginally unstable, and all de Sitter vacua metastable with sub-horizon, fast decay rates. They justify this via two lines of argument: a dualization-based weak gravity conjecture that bounds domain-wall tensions, and a dynamical consistency condition from eternal inflation to avoid Boltzmann brains. The work consequences include a limitation on non-supersymmetric AdS/CFT duals, the necessity of SUSY-preserving relevant deformations in SUSY CFTs, and a more interconnected landscape where large regions of one vacuum can exist inside another via marginally stable walls. If correct, these ideas reshape our understanding of vacuum stability, holography, and the global structure of the string landscape, particularly in relation to de Sitter dynamics and the great divide.

Abstract

We conjecture that all vacua in string theory decay. More precisely, non-supersymmetric vacua in string theory are at most metastable and eventually decay, while supersymmetric vacua are only marginally stable. All de Sitter vacua with small cosmological constant are metastable to decay via a process that occurs on scales small compared to the horizon size.