Evidence for KKLT de Sitter Vacua

The construction of de Sitter vacua remains a core problem for string theory.  A leading proposal, put forth 20 years ago by Kachru, Kallosh, Linde, and Trivedi, calls for the insertion of antibranes into a supersymmetric AdS vacuum with a conifold.  In this talk, we provide evidence for the existence of such vacua.  We begin by constructing the first examples of conifold AdS vacua with all moduli stabilized.  We then incorporate antibranes, working to leading order in the alpha' expansion, and construct an ensemble of candidate de Sitter vacua. We conclude with comments on the validity of the EFT, including the future prospects of finding dS candidates whose order parameters are such that they demonstrably survive alpha' corrections.