On de Sitter vacua in type IIA orientifold compactifications

This Letter discusses the orientifold projection of the quantum corrections to type IIA strings compactified on rigid Calabi-Yau threefolds. It is shown that N=2 membrane instanton effects give a holomorphic contribution to the superpotential, while the perturbative corrections enter into the Kähler potential. At the level of the scalar potential the corrections to the Kähler potential give rise to a positive energy contribution similar to adding anti-D3-branes in the KKLT scenario. This provides a natural mechanism to lift an AdS vacuum to a meta-stable dS vacuum.