Tachyonic Kaluza-Klein modes and the AdS swampland conjecture

Abstract

Abstract We compute the Kaluza-Klein spectrum of the non-supersymmetric SO(3) × SO(3)-invariant AdS4 vacuum of 11-dimensional supergravity, whose lowest-lying Kaluza-Klein modes belong to a consistent truncation to 4-dimensional $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 8 supergravity and are stable. We show that, nonetheless, the higher Kaluza-Klein modes become tachyonic so that this non-supersymmetric AdS4 vacuum is perturbatively unstable within 11-dimensional supergravity. This represents the first example of unstable higher Kaluza-Klein modes and provides further evidence for the AdS swampland conjecture, which states that there are no stable non-supersymmetric AdS vacua within string theory. We also find 27 infinitesimal moduli amongst the Kaluza-Klein modes, which hints at the existence of a family of non-supersymmetric AdS4 vacua.