Axionic Festina Lente

The swampland conjecture known as Festina Lente (FL) imposes a lower bound on the mass of all charged particles in a quasi-de Sitter space. In this paper, we propose the aFL (axionic Festina Lente) bound, an extension of FL to axion-like particles arising from type II string theory. We find that the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2023-01
Main Authors: Guidetti, Veronica, Righi, Nicole, Venken, Gerben, Westphal, Alexander
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Charged particles
Constraint modelling
Decay rate
Dipoles
Instantons
Lower bounds
String theory
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The swampland conjecture known as Festina Lente (FL) imposes a lower bound on the mass of all charged particles in a quasi-de Sitter space. In this paper, we propose the aFL (axionic Festina Lente) bound, an extension of FL to axion-like particles arising from type II string theory. We find that the product of the instanton action and the axion decay constant is bounded from below by the vacuum energy. This is achieved indirectly, using dimensional reduction on Calabi-Yau threefolds, and translating the FL result for dipoles into a purely geometric bound. We discuss axionic black holes evolution, and aFL constraints on Euclidean wormholes, showing that the gravitational arguments leading to the FL bound for U\((1)\) charged particles cannot be directly applied to axions. Moreover, we discuss phenomenological implications of the aFL bound, including constraints on string inflation models and the axion-photon coupling via kinetic mixing.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2206.03494