de Sitter swampland conjecture and the Higgs potential
Frederik Denef, Arthur Hebecker, and Timm Wrase
Phys. Rev. D 98, 086004 – Published 2 October 2018
Abstract
According to a conjecture recently put forward in [1], the scalar potential V of any consistent theory of quantum gravity satisfies a bound |∇V|/V≥O(1). This forbids de Sitter solutions and supports quintessence models of cosmic acceleration. Here, we point out that in the simplest models incorporating the standard model in addition to quintessence, with the two sectors decoupled as suggested by observations, the proposed bound is violated by 50 orders of magnitude. However, a very specific coupling between quintessence and just the Higgs sector may still be allowed and consistent with the conjecture.- Received 7 August 2018
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to
the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and
DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
FREE PDF GRATIS: Phys Rev D