News from the Swampland -- Constraining string theory with astrophysics and cosmology

Understand

Our current best guess for a unified theory of gravitation and quantum field theory (string theory) generically predicts a set of requirements for a consistently quantized theory, the Swampland criteria.

• Refined versions of these criteria have recently been shown to be in mild tension with cosmological observations.
• We summarize the status of the current impact of and constraints on the Swampland conjectures from cosmology, and subject a variety of dark energy quintessence models to recently released cosmological datasets.
• We find that instead of tightening the tension, the new data allows for slightly more freedom in the Swampland criteria.