Dark energy: EFTs and supergravity

Abstract: The subject of this thesis is cosmological implications of string compactifications understood in a broad sense. In the first half of the thesis, we will begin by reviewing the four-dimensional description of the tree-level perturbative type IIB action. We will then review a number of open questions in cosmology and their relevance with regards to the remainder of the thesis. We will first explore some of these cosmological questions from the perspective of effective field theories motivated by supergravity. From the naturalness of dark energy and how to obtain a naturally light dark energy field in terms of the clockwork mechanism and the Dvali-Kaloper-Sorbo four-form mixing. We also discuss the coincidence problem for dynamical models of dark energy consistent with a quintessence field slowly rolling down a potential slope, of the type one would expect from the asymptotics of moduli space. In the second half of the thesis, we introduce the effects of perturbative and non-perturbative corrections to the tree-level type IIB action. We then focus on obtaining a viable model of quintessence from the type IIB effective field theory. However, we are able to show that such a model must have a non-supersymmetric Minkowski vacuum at leading order. When we consider the effects of quantum fluctuations during the early Universe, we see that such models must have extremely fine-tuned initial conditions to describe a slow-rolling scalar field at present times. We conclude that quintessence faces more challenges than a true cosmological constant, to the point that quintessence is very unattractive for model building modulo a ruling out of the cosmological constant by observations. Following this line of reasoning, we consider whether other perturbative corrections can generate de Sitter solutions in an appropriate setting.