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Tackling the SDC in AdS with CFTs

Florent Baume, José Calderón Infante

TL;DR

This work extends the Swampland Distance Conjecture to curved AdS$_5$ backgrounds by leveraging their $ ext{N}=2$ SCFT holographic duals. Using the Maldacena–Zhiboedov theorem, it shows that infinite-distance points along conformal-manifold trajectories induce a tower of exponentially light higher-spin fields in the bulk, with decay rates bounded by conformal data and typically of order one in Planck units. The authors illustrate the mechanism in the canonical AdS$_5 imes S^5$ setup and in orbifold necklace quivers, where a weakly coupled (or free) subsector on the CFT side triggers the tower, while bulk interpretations include tensionless strings and higher-spin excitations; duality frames and class S techniques help connect free and strongly coupled limits. The results argue that, at fixed AdS radius, infinite-distance points in AdS moduli spaces correspond to breakdowns of supergravity and shifts to CFT descriptions, constraining the landscape of AdS vacua and offering a route to quantify swampland constraints via conformal data.

Abstract

We study the Swampland Distance Conjecture for supersymmetric theories with AdS${}_5$ backgrounds and fixed radius through their $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFT holographic duals. By the Maldacena-Zhiboedov theorem, around a large class of infinite-distance points there must exist a tower of exponentially massless higher-spin fields in the bulk, for which we find bounds on the decay rate in terms of the conformal data. We discuss the origin of this tower in the gravity side for type IIB compactification on $S^5$ and its orbifolds, and comment about more general cases.

Tackling the SDC in AdS with CFTs

TL;DR

This work extends the Swampland Distance Conjecture to curved AdS backgrounds by leveraging their SCFT holographic duals. Using the Maldacena–Zhiboedov theorem, it shows that infinite-distance points along conformal-manifold trajectories induce a tower of exponentially light higher-spin fields in the bulk, with decay rates bounded by conformal data and typically of order one in Planck units. The authors illustrate the mechanism in the canonical AdS setup and in orbifold necklace quivers, where a weakly coupled (or free) subsector on the CFT side triggers the tower, while bulk interpretations include tensionless strings and higher-spin excitations; duality frames and class S techniques help connect free and strongly coupled limits. The results argue that, at fixed AdS radius, infinite-distance points in AdS moduli spaces correspond to breakdowns of supergravity and shifts to CFT descriptions, constraining the landscape of AdS vacua and offering a route to quantify swampland constraints via conformal data.

Abstract

We study the Swampland Distance Conjecture for supersymmetric theories with AdS backgrounds and fixed radius through their SCFT holographic duals. By the Maldacena-Zhiboedov theorem, around a large class of infinite-distance points there must exist a tower of exponentially massless higher-spin fields in the bulk, for which we find bounds on the decay rate in terms of the conformal data. We discuss the origin of this tower in the gravity side for type IIB compactification on and its orbifolds, and comment about more general cases.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 12 sections, 53 equations, 1 figure.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Note added:
  3. A Warm-up: Type IIB $\text{AdS}_5\times \text{S}^5$ Vacua
  4. $\mathcal{N}=2$ Conformal Manifolds in Four Dimensions
  5. The Zamolodchikov Metric
  6. The SDC and Weakly-gauged Points
  7. Beyond Free Points
  8. Orbifolds and $\mathcal{N}=2$ Necklace Quivers
  9. Overall Free Limit
  10. Strong-coupling Points and Dualities
  11. Conclusions
  12. Superconformal Representations of $SU(2,2|2)$

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Left: quiver representation for the $\hat{A}_{K-1}$ necklace theory, with each node corresponding to a $\mathcal{N}=2$ vector multiplet and each line a hypermultiplet in the bifundamental of the adjacent groups. Right: the torus with $K$ minimal punctures, $T^2_K$, of the associated class S construction.