A no-go theorem for accelerating cosmologies from M-theory compactifications

Abstract

It is known that four-dimensional cosmologies exhibiting transient phases of acceleration can be obtained by compactifications of low-energy effective string or M-theory on time-varying manifolds. In the four-dimensional theory, the acceleration can be attributed to a quintessential scalar field with a positive effective potential. Recently, Townsend has conjectured that the potentials obtained by such compactifications cannot give rise to late-time accelerating universes which possess future event horizons. Such a ‘no-go’ result would be desirable, since current string or M-theory seems unable to provide an adequate description of space–times with future event horizons. In this Letter, we provide a proof of this conjecture for a class of warped compactifications with a single scalar modulus parametrising the volume of the compactification manifold.