Remarks on scale separation in flux vacua

Abstract: We argue that the Maldacena-Nuñez no-go theorem excluding Minkowski and de Sitter vacua in flux compactifications can be extended to anti-de Sitter (AdS) vacua for which the Kaluza-Klein scale is parametrically smaller than the AdS length scale. In the absence of negative tension sources, scale-separated AdS vacua are ruled out in 11-dimensional supergravity; in 10-dimensional supergravity, we show that such vacua can only arise in conjunction with large dilaton gradients. As a practical application of this observation we demonstrate that the mechanism to resolve O6 singularities in massive type IIA at the classical level is likely not to occur in AdS compactifications with scale separation. We furthermore remark that a compactification to four observable dimensions implies a large cosmological hierarchy.