Related papers: The Weak Gravity Conjecture and Scalar Fields
The distance conjecture states that for theories with moduli coupled to gravity a tower of states becomes light exponentially in the geodesic distance in moduli space. This specifies how effective field theories break down for large field…
We study the weak gravity conjecture, the swampland distance conjecture and the emergence proposal for $\mathcal{N}=1$ orientifold compactifications of type IIB string theory with O3-/O7-planes. We allow for orientifold projections with…
We propose to sharpen the weak gravity conjecture by the statement that, except for BPS states in a supersymmetric theory, the gravitational force is strictly weaker than any electric force and provide a number of evidences for this…
For a light scalar coupled to gravity, I study the gravitational backreaction associated with large field variations. I show a generic obstruction in sourcing a super-Planckian scalar profile without making the whole experiment collapse…
A second order pole in the scalar kinetic term can lead to a class of inflation models with universal predictions referred to as pole inflation or $\alpha$-attractors. While this kinetic structure is ubiquitous in supergravity effective…
The weak-gravity bound has been discovered in several asymptotically safe gravity-matter systems. It limits the strength of gravitational fluctuations that are compatible with an ultraviolet-complete matter sector, and results from the…
In theories with discrete Abelian gauge groups, requiring that black holes be able to lose their charge as they evaporate leads to an upper bound on the product of a charged particle's mass and the cutoff scale above which the effective…
We point out that the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) implies that sufficiently small extremal black holes are necessarily in the strong-field regime of electrodynamics, and therefore probe the UV completion of the Maxwell sector. To…
The swampland distance conjecture (SDC) addresses the ability of effective field theory to describe distant points in moduli space. It is natural to ask whether there is a local version of the SDC: is it possible to construct local…
Positivity bounds coming from consistency of UV scattering amplitudes are in general insufficient to prove the weak gravity conjecture for theories beyond Einstein-Maxwell. Additional ingredients about the UV may be necessary to exclude…
The weak gravity conjecture (WGC) is an ultraviolet consistency condition asserting that an Abelian force requires a state of charge $q$ and mass $m$ with $q>m/m_{\rm Pl}$. We generalize the WGC to product gauge groups and study its tension…
Within the weak-field approximation of general relativity, new exact solutions are derived for the gravitational field of a mass moving with arbitrary velocity and acceleration. A mass having a constant velocity greater than 3^-1/2 times…
We study new consistent scalar-tensor theories of gravity recently introduced by Langlois and Noui with potentially interesting cosmological applications. We derive the conditions for the existence of a primary constraint that prevents the…
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…
The initial idea underlying the Weak Gravity Conjecture is that extremal black holes must always be "unstable", in the sense that they should slowly decay by emitting either particles or smaller black holes. Here we show that, when this…
Common features of known quantum gravity theories may hint at the general nature of quantum gravity. The absence of continuous global symmetries is one such feature. This inspired the Weak Gravity Conjecture, which bounds masses of charged…
We consider 4d $\mathcal{N}=1$ supergravity theories with modular symmetry, where the modulus $\tau$ is the upper half-plane modulo $SL(2,\mathbf{Z})$ action. We focus on enhanced discrete gauge symmetry points $\tau=i, \exp(2\pi i/3)$, and…
We construct a model unifying gravity with weak $SU(2)$ gauge and "Higgs" scalar fields. We assume the existence of a visible and an invisible (hidden) sector of the Universe. We used the extension of Plebanski's 4-dimensional gravitational…
The black hole weak gravity conjecture (WGC) is a set of linear inequalities on the four-derivative corrections to Einstein--Maxwell theory. Remarkably, in four dimensions, these combinations appear in the $2 \to 2$ photon amplitudes,…
We investigate the nature of additional scalar degrees of freedom contained in extended hybrid metric-Palatini gravity, outlining the emergence of two coupled dynamical scalar modes. In particular, we discuss the weak field limit of the…