Stringy corrections to Kahler potentials, SUSY breaking, and the cosmological constant problem

Abstract

The moduli of N = 1 compactifications of IIB string theory can be stabilized by a combination of fluxes (which freeze complex structure moduli and the dilaton) and nonperturbative superpotentials (which freeze Kähler moduli), typically leading to supersymmetric AdS vacua. We show that stringy corrections to the Kähler potential qualitatively alter the structure of the effective scalar potential even at large volume, and can give rise to non-supersymmetric vacua including metastable de Sitter spacetimes. Our results suggest an approach to solving the cosmological constant problem, so that the scale of the 1-loop corrected cosmological constant can be much smaller than the scale of supersymmetry breaking.