Résumé |
Vacuum compactifications may suffer from instabilities under small perturbations
or bubble nucleation. While supersymmetric vacua are protected from both, it is an
open question whether any non-supersymmetric AdS vacuum can be stable. We will
attack this problem using positive-energy theorems. We will first see how to apply
such theorems to supersymmetric vacua in M-theory and type II supergravity, rather
than to their effective lower-dimensional reductions. We will then present some
strategies to modify the arguments in the non-supersymmetric case. In M-theory, at
the lower-derivative level, such modifications fail to stabilize the skew-whiffed
and Englert vacua.
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