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KKLT compactifications ex nihilo

Iosif Bena1, Yixuan Li2,3, and Severin Lüst4

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 046013 – Published 17 February, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/gcyw-pc83

Abstract

Flux compactifications that give three- or four-dimensional anti–de Sitter vacua with a parametrically small negative cosmological constant are claimed to be ubiquitous in string theory. However, the 1+1 and 2+1 dimensional conformal-field-theory (CFT) duals to such vacua should have very large central charges and rather unusual properties. We construct brane configurations that source these would-be anti-de Sitter (AdS) flux compactifications, and identify certain UV AdS geometries that these branes source. The central charge of the CFT duals to these UV AdS geometries place lower bounds on the absolute values of the cosmological constants of the AdS vacua. These bounds are incompatible with the scale separation needed to construct realistic cosmological models.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 046013– Published 17 February, 2026
  • Received 6 March 2025
  • Accepted 20 January 2026
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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.

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