De Sitter vacua and the string landscape
String theory allows a huge number of ways to curl up its extra dimensions, each giving a different low-energy universe. Whether any of them is a long-lived universe with small positive vacuum energy, as ours appears to be, and whether their number is finite, is disputed.
Why it matters
It decides whether string theory can describe our accelerating universe.
Review
M. R. Douglas, S. Kachru, Flux compactification, Rev. Mod. Phys. 79, 733, 2007. https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0610102 reference checked
Timestamp record
- Signed record
- 925c6562a6d5…
- Public log
- Entry 326, in checkpoint 2,123
- In the log by
- Block 969,698, 2026-10-03
This text was in the PubPhys log by that date. The date says nothing about when the problem was first posed.