The de Sitter Problem in the String Swampland: A Verified Literature Map

This is a literature map, not original research. It surveys an active and contested debate in string/M-theory — whether string/M-theory admits stable or metastable de Sitter vacua — and represents the field's disagreements without adjudicating them. It advances no physics position of its own and reports no new result.

The map organises the debate into seven open problems, each stated as a question: the parametric 10D control of the KKLT anti-brane uplift; whether the Large Volume Scenario can build metastable de Sitter under rigorous control; the status of the de Sitter Swampland Conjecture as a quantum-gravity constraint; the consistency of the Dark Dimension scenario with gravitational and astrophysical bounds; quintessence as the dark-energy alternative; the Dine-Seiberg problem; and the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture. For each, it states the strongest argument on both sides, names the principal researchers and groups, and cites the key works. A dependency map shows that three of the seven problems are angles on a single underlying question about effective-field-theory control, and that the swampland conjectures and their phenomenological consequences sit downstream of it. A closing section assesses, without inflation, which corners of this literature an outside contributor could realistically engage and which are effectively closed without an expert collaborator.

Provenance. The document was produced by human-directed AI synthesis: an agentic model assembled the structure, camps, and candidate citations under the author's direction, and a second AI instrument resolved every citation against arXiv and INSPIRE-HEP. All twenty-four arXiv identifiers cited have been independently resolved; three foundational works are cited by journal reference. Each citation carries a provenance tag recording its verification status, and a Verification Ledger records what was checked, what was corrected, and what remains open. Camp placement was checked against what each paper actually argues, not merely whether it exists — one placement was corrected on that basis. The division of labour between human and AI instruments, and the specific failure mode the verification procedure exists to catch, are documented in the paper itself.

Status. Non-peer-reviewed working paper. Reliable as a map of who argues what and where the fault lines run; not a substitute for the primary papers.