Musings

I hadn’t noticed when their paper appeared last May, but Trigiante’s talk at a Workshop in Leuven caught my eye.

They’ve found stable de Sitter solutions to gauged N=2 supergravity. The gauging is always by a product group (SO(2,1)×SO(2) or SO(2,1)×SO(3)), where one of the factors is noncompact and the other factor admits a Fayet-Iliopoulos term.

It would be quite interesting to embed these gauged supergravity theories in string theory. For compact gaugings, the gauged supergravity theory turns out to be a “consistent truncation” of some ten-dimensional string background. The gauge group ends up being the isometry group of the internal space.

I’ve never had much of a conceptual handle on the noncompact gaugings of extended supergravity theories, but if one could find these solutions as consistent truncations of some string background, that would be very exciting.