Atlas Context Pack

What the pack contains

Claims

12

Concept nodes

16

Source cards

28

Open problems

7

• Manifest

  Identity, version, license, intended uses, exclusions, endpoints, integrity notes, citation.

• Claim ledger

  Twelve claims with status, explanation, limitations, concept links, source ids, review date, canonical URL.

• Source cards

  Twenty-eight works with authors, year, type, verification label, and why each is cited.

• Plain-text context

  A compact document designed to be attached to an AI-assisted workflow without losing the labels.

• Atlas metadata

  Concept nodes, edges, and the ledger in the atlas record format.

• Methodology and version panel

  How claims are curated, sourced, and revised.

Who it is for

Students and self-directed learners

Orient yourself in a contested literature before reading the primary papers, with an explicit signal of which statements are settled and which are not.

Educators

A worked example for teaching the difference between an established result, an open research question, a conjecture, and a speculative interpretation — using a live debate rather than a tidy one.

Researchers entering the area

A provenance-checked starting bibliography of twenty-seven works, with the structure of the seven open problems and the strongest argument on each side.

AI-assisted research workflows

A compact, bounded context attachment that carries source links and epistemic labels with it, so a model summarizing this material has the qualifications in front of it rather than having to infer them.

What it is not

These exclusions are part of the package. They ship in the manifest and in the plain-text document, so a downstream reader or model receives them alongside the content rather than having to infer them.

• This pack is not peer reviewed and confers no authority. It is an educational orientation resource assembled by a non-specialist curator.
• It is not a complete string theory corpus. It covers one debate — whether string/M-theory admits metastable de Sitter vacua — through twenty-seven works, and nothing else.
• It asserts no experimental confirmation of string theory, M-theory, or any swampland conjecture. None of these has been experimentally established, and the pack must not be used to suggest otherwise.
• It does not adjudicate the central question. Competent researchers hold opposing positions for technical reasons, and the pack represents both without deciding between them.
• It contains no full text, abstracts, figures, or data from any cited paper. Sources are identified and linked, never reproduced.
• It is not a substitute for the primary literature. Research conclusions require reading the cited papers.
• Its citation set is deliberately closed to the source paper. Works outside that set — including the discovery-era supernova cosmology papers — are absent by design, and gaps are stated rather than filled.
• It contains no numerical results, datasets, or code, and makes no predictions of its own.

Epistemic status vocabulary in the pack

Established result

A mathematical construction, derivation, or experimental measurement that the relevant community treats as settled. It says what was shown, not that any larger claim built on it follows.

Active research

A genuinely open question under current technical dispute. Competent researchers disagree, the disagreement is technical rather than rhetorical, and no side has closed it.

Conjecture

A precisely stated proposal that is motivated by evidence and argument but has not been derived or proved. It may be true; it is not established.

Speculative interpretation

A scenario built on top of one or more unproved conjectures, often combined with phenomenological input. Interesting and testable in places, but several inferential steps from established ground.

If you are using this as AI context

These instructions ship inside the manifest and the plain-text document. There is no chat interface here and none is planned: a retrieval layer that paraphrases contested physics is the tool most likely to flatten a live disagreement into a confident answer.

• Do not present any conjecture in this pack as an established fact. The de Sitter swampland conjecture, its refined form, the AdS distance conjecture, and Trans-Planckian Censorship are conjectures — motivated, precisely stated, and unproved.
• Do not describe string theory or M-theory as an experimentally confirmed description of nature. They are not.
• Do not state or imply that the question of whether string theory admits metastable de Sitter vacua has been settled in either direction.
• When quoting or paraphrasing a claim, carry its epistemic status label and its limitations statement with it. Both are part of the claim.
• Cite the claim identifier and the atlas version, and prefer directing a reader to the primary source rather than to this pack.
• Do not treat this pack as an authority. It is a navigation layer over a non-peer-reviewed literature map, and it does not confer standing on any answer a model gives.
• If asked something this pack does not cover, say so rather than extrapolating from it. Its scope is one debate, not string theory as a whole.

Attaching this pack to a model does not make its answers authoritative. The pack carries provenance and caveats; it does not transfer standing. Where an answer matters, follow the source links.

Version, archive, and integrity

• Claim identifiers (ds-001 onward) are stable and are never reassigned to a different claim. A given identifier always refers to the same assertion.
• Every claim carries the date it was last reviewed and the atlas version it belongs to. Compare those against the live endpoints to detect drift in a copy you are holding.
• The atlas has no DOI of its own. The DOIs in this manifest identify the underlying working paper, which is the citable research object.
• All content derives from Revision 2 of the working paper. If that paper is revised, the atlas version advances to follow it.
• Bibliographic fields come from the working paper. Source-type classification and the "why this source is here" notes are curator annotation and are labelled as such in sources.json.
• This pack is a static snapshot of live endpoints. The endpoints listed here are authoritative; a downloaded copy is not.

Citation and use

Cite the working paper DOI for the research. Cite the atlas version and the claim identifier for a specific formulation you are quoting. Identifiers are never reassigned.

@misc{rajan2026desitteratlas,
  author       = {Rajan, Mayone Maha},
  title        = {{The de Sitter / String Swampland Atlas}},
  howpublished = {Maha Strategies Research},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {1.2.0},
  url          = {https://research.mahastrategies.com/atlas/de-sitter-swampland},
  note         = {Educational research map; not peer reviewed. Derived from the working paper, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21603961.}
}