IAS Physics Group Meeting

Abstract: I will briefly review the obstacles to constructing Anti–de Sitter vacua in string theory with very small extra dimensions compared to the AdS length, and the main ideas proposed to overcome them. I will then focus on a particular class of scale-separated setups, including the DGKT and KKLT constructions, and argue that their would-be CFT duals cannot arise as infrared limits of any brane configuration in string theory. Finally, I will show that a genuine holographic dual can emerge from a brane decoupling limit only if the AdS scalar potential satisfies some stringent consistency condition.