Speaker
Description
There has recently been considerable interest in the question whether and under which conditions accelerated cosmological expansion can arise in the asymptotic regions of field space of a d-dimensional EFT. In this talk I will present a conjecture that such acceleration is impossible unless there exist metastable de Sitter vacua in more than d dimensions. That is, Asymptotic Acceleration Implies de Sitter' (AA⇒DS). Phrased negatively, the d-dimensionalNo Asymptotic Acceleration' conjecture (a.k.a. the `strong asymptotic dS conjecture') follows from the de Sitter conjecture in more than d dimensions. The key idea is that the relevant field-space asymptotics almost always correspond to decompactification and that the only positive energy contribution which decays sufficiently slowly in this regime is the vacuum energy of a higher-dimensional metastable vacuum. This result is in agreement with recent Swampland bounds on the potential in the asymptotics in field space from e.g. the species bound, but is significantly more constraining. As an intriguing observation, the asymptotic expansion that arises from compactifying a de Sitter vacuum always satisfies and can saturate the bound from the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture.
