de Sitter and Microstate Landscapes in String Theory

There has been a recent burst of activity in the area of de Sitter and black hole microstate landscapes in String Theory. On the black hole side this was driven on one hand by “fuzzball/firewall” information-theory-based arguments that black hole solutions are only thermodynamic approximations that stop describing the physics at the scale of the horizon, and on the other hand by the construction of huge families of horizonless solutions that have black hole charges and mass and that are dual to the microstates of the black hole. On the cosmology side this was driven by the realization that antibranes, which are one of the key ingredients needed to obtain a landscape of de Sitter vacua and to construct inflationary models in String Theory may give rise to instabilities or runaway behaviors. This in turn would eliminate a large number of cosmological models and indicate that the landscape of de Sitter vacua might be much smaller than previously thought. The conference will be devoted to discussing the latest developments in these areas and to creating a framework to begin collaboration on these topics.

Organizers: Iosif Bena, Mariana Graña, Stanislav Kuperstein, Ruben Minasian

Participants: