LVS de Sitter vacua are probably in the swampland

Abstract

We argue that dS vacua in the LARGE-volume scenario of type IIB string theory are vulnerable to various unsuppressed curvature, warping and gs corrections. We work out in general how these corrections affect the moduli vevs, the vacuum energy and the moduli masses in the 4D EFT for the two Kähler moduli, the conifold modulus and a nilpotent superfield describing the anti-brane uplift. Our analysis reveals that the corrections are parametrically larger in the relevant expressions than one might have guessed from their suppression in the off-shell potential. Some corrections appear without any parametric suppression at all, which makes them particularly dangerous for candidate dS vacua. Other types of corrections can in principle be made small for appropriate parameter choices. However, we show in an explicit model that this is never possible for all corrections at the same time when the vacuum energy is positive. Some of the corrections we consider are also relevant for the stability of non-supersymmetric AdS vacua.