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arXiv · 2604.25918

de Sitter in String Theory vs. Gibbons & Hawking

Yoav Zigdon
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Abstract

This paper corroborates a statement that perturbative string theory does not admit a solution whose spacetime metric is de Sitter times a closed manifold, to all orders in the $\alpha'$ and $g_s$ expansions, under the assumption that the logarithm of the sphere partition function of Euclidean quantum gravity receives a nonzero contribution proportional to $\frac{1}{G_N}$ in a saddle-point approximation. This assumption is related to the Gibbons-Hawking proposal that the entropy of the cosmological horizon of the static patch is $\frac{A}{4G_N}$. Evidence for the statement comes from independent approaches to the effective action of string theory, all of which agree that the tree-level action vanishes for closed Euclidean target-space solutions. One possible implication is that the state of the Universe will depart from an asymptotically de Sitter spacetime.

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Yoav Zigdon. 2026-04-28. de Sitter in String Theory vs. Gibbons & Hawking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25918

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