Related papers: Axion Monodromy and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
We show that the thin wall limit of the thick domain wall associated with a sine-Gordon soliton in a single non-compactified patch of 5-dimensional spacetime explicitly yields the Randall-Sundrum localized gravity two patch brane, with its…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) demands the existence of superextremal particles in any consistent quantum theory of gravity. The standard lore is that these particles are introduced to ensure that extremal black holes are either unstable…
We point out that the swampland conjectures, forbidding the presence of global symmetries and (meta-)stable de Sitter vacua within quantum gravity, pick up a dynamical axion for the electroweak SU(2) gauge theory as a natural candidate for…
Motivated by the desire to improve our understanding of the Weak Gravity Conjecture, we compute the one-loop correction of charged particles to the geometry and entropy of extremal black holes in 4d. We find that fermion loops provide…
We propose a new scenario of baryogenesis, in which annihilation of axion domain walls generates a sizable baryon asymmetry. Successful baryogenesis is possible for a wide range of the axion mass and decay constant, $m \simeq 10^8 -10^{13}$…
We show how toroidally-compactified eleven-dimensional supergravity can be consistently truncated to yield a variety of maximally-supersymmetric ``massive'' supergravities in spacetime dimensions $D\le 8$. The mass terms arise as a…
We use the formulation of thermodynamics of gravity as proposed by Clifton, Ellis and Tavakol on the gravitational collapse of dustlike matter, that violates the strong or weak cosmic censorship conjecture depending on the initial data. We…
We consider some questions of naturalness which arise when one considers conventional field theories in the presence of gravitation: the problem of global symmetries, the strong CP problem, and the cosmological constant problem. Using…
We have recently shown that a class of counterexamples to (weak) cosmic censorship in anti-de Sitter spacetime is removed if the weak gravity conjecture holds. Surprisingly, the minimum value of the charge to mass ratio necessary to…
While axions seem ubiquitous in critical string theories, whether they might survive in any string theoretic description of nature is a difficult question. With some mild assumptions, one can frame the issues in the case that there is an…
In the present thesis, using an effective field theory point of view, we explore theories of single-field inflation where higher derivative operators become relevant, affecting in a novel way the dynamics and therefore the observations. For…
The previous proposal (by two of us) of chain inflation with the QCD axion is shown to fail. The proposal involved a series of fast tunneling events, yet here it is shown that tunneling is too slow. We calculate the bubble nucleation rates…
Many cosmological models rely on large couplings of axions to gauge fields. Examples include theories of magnetogenesis, inflation on a steep potential, chiral gravitational waves, and chromonatural inflation. Such theories require a…
Theories in which the Peccei-Quinn phase transition occurs after inflation tend to suffer from problematic domain walls. One possible solution involves a small, explicit breaking ot the symmetry. But this raises other potential issues. We…
We derive the gravitational dynamics of the tensorial geometry which underlies the most general linear theory of electrodynamics that features weak birefringence in vacuo. This derivation is performed by way of gravitational closure, which…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) asserts a powerful consistency condition on gauge theories coupled to gravity, and it is widely believed that its proof will shed light on the quantum origin of gravitational interactions. Holography, and…
We study implications of the weak gravity conjecture in the AdS/CFT correspondence. Unlike in Minkowski spacetime, AdS spacetime has a physical length scale, so that the conjecture must be generalized with an additional parameter. We…
A popular proposal for resolving the Hubble tension involves an early phase of dark energy, driven by an axion field with a periodic potential. In this paper, we argue that these models are tightly constrained by the axion weak gravity…
We investigate the cosmological constraints on axion models where the domain wall number is greater than one. In these models, multiple domain walls attached to strings are formed, and they survive for a long time. Their annihilation occurs…
It is well known that the spontaneous breaking of discrete symmetries may lead to conflict with big-bang cosmology. This is due to formation of domain walls which give unacceptable contribution to the energy density of the universe. On the…