Is dark energy even allowed in string theory?

A new conjecture is the cause of excitement in the string theory community. Timm Wrase of the Vienna University of Technology has now published his much-discussed results on recent new developments.

In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: string theory is said to be fundamentally incompatible with our current understanding of dark energy—but only with dark energy can we explain the accelerated expansion of our current universe.

Timm Wrase of the Vienna University of Technology quickly realized something odd about this conjecture: it seemed to be incompatible with the existence of the Higgs particle. His calculations, which he carried out together with theorists from Columbia University in New York and the University of Heidelberg, have now been published in Physical Review D. At the moment, there are heated discussions about strings and dark energy all around the world. Wrase hopes that this will lead to new breakthroughs in this line of research.