Racetrack potentials and the de Sitter swampland conjectures

We show that one can find de Sitter critical points (saddle points) in models of flux compactification of Type IIB String Theory without any uplifting terms and in the presence of several moduli. We demonstrate this by giving explicit examples following some of the ideas recently presented by Conlon in ref. [1], as well as more generic situations where one can violate the strong form of the de Sitter Swampland Conjecture. We stabilize the complex structure and the dilaton with fluxes, and we introduce a racetrack potential that fixes the Kahler moduli. The resultant potentials generically exhibit de Sitter critical points and satisfy several consistency requirements such as flux quantization, large internal volume, and weak coupling, as well as a form of the so-called Weak Gravity Conjecture. Furthermore, we compute the form of the potential around these de Sitter saddle points and comment on these results in connection to the refined and more recent version of the de Sitter Swampland Conjecture.We thank Igor Bandos, Jose L. F. Barbon, Mark Hertzberg, Renata Kallosh, Andrei Linde, Ander Retolaza, Kepa Sousa, Raul Vera, and Alex Vilenkin for useful conversations. We would like to further thank Kepa Sousa for collaboration on the early stages of this work. This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry MINECO grant (FPA2015-64041-C2-1P), and the Basque Government grant (IT-979-16). J.J.B.-P. is also supported in part by the Basque Foundation for Science (IKERBASQUE) and M.A.U. by the University of the Basque Country (PIF17/74)