Published for SISSA by Springer Received: March 21, 2019 Accepted: May 7, 2019 Published: May 20, 2019 Modular symmetries and the swampland conjectures JHEP05(2019)105 E. Gonzalo,a;b L.E. Ib´a~neza;b and A.M. Urangaa aInstituto de F´ısica Te´orica IFT-UAM/CSIC, C/ Nicol´as Cabrera 13-15, Campus de Cantoblanco, 28049 Madrid, Spain bDepartamento de F´ısica Te´orica, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Aut´onomade Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain E-mail:
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[email protected] Abstract: Recent string theory tests of swampland ideas like the distance or the dS conjectures have been performed at weak coupling. Testing these ideas beyond the weak coupling regime remains challenging. We propose to exploit the modular symmetries of the moduli effective action to check swampland constraints beyond perturbation theory. As an example we study the case of heterotic 4d N = 1 compactifications, whose non-perturbative effective action is known to be invariant under modular symmetries acting on the K¨ahler and complex structure moduli, in particular SL(2; Z) T-dualities (or subgroups thereof) for 4d heterotic or orbifold compactifications. Remarkably, in models with non-perturbative superpotentials, the corresponding duality invariant potentials diverge at points at infinite distance in moduli space. The divergence relates to towers of states becoming light, in agreement with the distance conjecture. We discuss specific examples of this behavior based on gaugino condensation in heterotic orbifolds. We show that these examples are dual to compactifications of type I' or Horava-Witten theory, in which the SL(2; Z) acts on the complex structure of an underlying 2-torus, and the tower of light states correspond to D0-branes or M-theory KK modes.