Remarks on Positive Energy Vacua via Effective Potentials in String Theory

We study warped compactifications of string/M theory with the help of effective potentials, continuing previous work of the last two authors and Michael R. Douglas presented in (On the boundedness of effective potentials arising from string compactifications. Communications in Mathematical Physics 325(3):847–878, 2014). Under physically reasonable assumptions, we provide a mathematically rigorous proof of the existence of positive local minima of a large class of effective potentials. The dynamics of the conformal factor of the internal metric, which is responsible for instabilities in these constructions, is explored, and such instabilities are investigated in the context of de Sitter vacua. We prove existence results for the equations of motion in the case of a slowly varying warp factor, and the stability of such solutions is also addressed. These solutions are a family of meta-stable de Sitter vacua from type IIB string theory in a general non-supersymmetric setup.