A brief remark on convexity of effective potentials and de Sitter Swampland conjectures

Abstract

Recently proposed de Sitter Swampland conjectures imply non-trivial constraints on a scalar field potential in any effective field theory that admits a quantum gravity completion. The original conjecture apparently excludes many phenomenologically motivated scalar potentials with de Sitter extrema, such as the perturbative Standard Model Higgs potential and the QCD axion potential, as the viable low-energy theories. Subsequently, the refined, weaker conjecture was proposed. However, the full effective potential, having been defined as a Legendre transform, is necessarily convex. This ensures that the original Swampland conjecture can actually be satisfied in phenomenologically relevant models, providing no de Sitter vacua exist.