The landscape, the swampland and the era of precision cosmology

Abstract

We review the advanced version of the KKLT construction and pure $d=4$ de Sitter supergravity, involving a nilpotent multiplet, with regard to various conjectures that de Sitter state cannot exist in string theory. We explain why we consider these conjectures problematic and not well motivated, and why the recently proposed alternative string theory models of dark energy, ignoring vacuum stabilization, are ruled out by cosmological observations at least at the $3\sigma$ level, i.e. with more than $99.7\%$ confidence.

Comments: 48 pages, 10 figures. v2: Improved version; discussions added, typos fixed, structure modified, appendix added on two-field scenarios, note added in response to arXiv:1809.00154. v3: Published version