AdS and the Swampland

Abstract

We study aspects of anti-de Sitter space in the context of the Swampland. In particular, we conjecture that the near-flat limit of pure AdS belongs to the Swampland, as it is necessarily accompanied by an infinite tower of light states. The mass of the tower is power-law in the cosmological constant, with a power of 12 for the supersymmetric case. We discuss relations between this behaviour and other Swampland conjectures such as the censorship of an unbounded number of massless fields, and the refined de Sitter conjecture. Moreover, we propose that changes to the AdS radius have an interpretation in terms of a generalised distance conjecture which associates a distance to variations of all fields. In this framework, we argue that the distance to the Λ→0 limit of AdS is infinite, leading to the light tower of states. We also discuss implications of the conjecture for de Sitter space.