Abstract
We discuss the cosmological implications of the string swampland conjectures for late-time cosmology, and test them against a wide range of state of the art cosmological observations. The refined de Sitter conjecture constrains either the minimal slope or the curvature of the scalar potential, and depends on two dimensionless constants. For constants of size one or larger, tension exists between observations, especially the Hubble constant, and the slope and curvature conjectures at a level of and , respectively. Smaller values of the constants are permitted by observations, and we determine upper bounds at varying confidence levels. We also derive and constrain the relationship between cosmological observables and the scalar field excursion during the acceleration epoch, thereby testing the distance conjecture.
- Received 4 February 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.083518
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.
Published by the American Physical Society