Metastable Vacua in Flux Compactifications and Their Phenomenology
Oleg Lebedev, Valéri Löwen, Yann Mambrini, Hans Peter Nilles, Michael Ratz
TL;DR
The work addresses the challenge of realizing metastable de Sitter vacua with small positive cosmological constant in flux compactifications by implementing $F$-term uplifting: coupling a hidden SUSY-breaking sector to the KKLT modulus stabilization. It demonstrates, in a model-independent framework, that a heavy modulus and a dynamically broken hidden sector can yield a tunable CC with hierarchically small $m_{3/2}$ and a distinctive SUSY-breaking pattern where scalars are heavy but gauginos are comparatively light. The paper provides concrete examples (Polonyi and ISS-inspired sectors), analyzes soft terms, and presents a detailed phenomenological exploration showing viable regions of parameter space consistent with collider and dark matter constraints, plus prospects for direct and indirect detection. It also discusses cosmological considerations, arguing that the uplift mechanism does not introduce new gravitino/moduli problems and can alleviate some of them depending on parameter choices. The results offer a concrete string-inspired pathway to realistic SUSY phenomenology with testable implications for colliders and dark matter experiments.
Abstract
In the context of flux compactifications, metastable vacua with a small positive cosmological constant are obtained by combining a sector where supersymmetry is broken dynamically with the sector responsible for moduli stabilization, which is known as the F-uplifting. We analyze this procedure in a model-independent way and study phenomenological properties of the resulting vacua.