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Sergey Ketov (11:15): Primordial black holes as a probe of high-scale inflation and supergravity
Abstract: Starobinsky inflation model is reviewed as an introduction. Its generalizations are proposed toward production of primordial black holes during inflation and the induced gravitational waves. Supergravity extensions of all that are also described, and their connection to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model is outlined.
Vincent Van Hemelryck (14:00): Connecting flux vacua with scalar field excursions
Abstract: The Swampland program has been instrumental in finding out which effective field theories cannot arise from quantum gravity, hence classifying which ones belong the Landscape. For instance, in the context of string compactifications, one could travel in the Landscape between two vacua of the same compactification. If separated by a large distance in the scalar field space, then according to the Swampland distance conjecture, a tower of states must become exponentially light in that distance.
For AdS flux vacua however, the cosmological constant is determined by discrete fluxes, and defining distances in a discrete Landscape is not a fully understood issue yet. Nevertheless, the AdS distance conjecture states that as the AdS cosmological constant decreases, a tower of states should become light as well, while its strong version rules out scale separation in string theory.
This talk aims to address this issue by proposing a continuous method to interpolate between flux vacua with open-string scalar fields. Those are realised by resolving usual thin domain walls as BPS D-branes into thick domain walls as non-BPS branes. I will show how open-string tachyons of these non-BPS branes provide a way to interpolate between the flux vacua, and illustrate with examples how scalar distances between vacua can be computed.