Related papers: Emergence and the Swampland Conjectures
The Distance Conjecture of Ooguri and Vafa holds that any infinite-distance limit in the moduli space of a quantum gravity theory must be accompanied by a tower of exponentially light particles, which places tight constraints on the…
We study scenarios where a scalar field has a spatially varying vacuum expectation value such that the total field variation is super-Planckian. We focus on the case where the scalar field controls the coupling of a U(1) gauge field, which…
We propose a generalisation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The proposal is guided by properties of extremal black holes in ${\cal N}=2$ supergravity, but can be understood more generally in terms of…
The swampland is the set of seemingly consistent low-energy effective field theories that cannot be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. In this review we cover some of the conjectural properties that effective theories should possess…
Quantum gravitational effects become significant at a cut-off species scale that can be much lower than the Planck scale whenever we get a parametrically large number of fields becoming light. This is expected to occur at any perturbative…
Swampland conjectures are a set of proposed necessary conditions for a low-energy effective field theory to have a UV completion inside a theory of quantum gravity. Swampland conjectures have interesting phenomenological consequences, and…
The Distance Conjecture holds that any infinite-distance limit in the scalar field moduli space of a consistent theory of quantum gravity must be accompanied by a tower of light particles whose masses scale exponentially with proper field…
We propose a new version of the scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) which would apply to any scalar field coupled to quantum gravity. For a single scalar it is given by the differential constraint $V''\leq…
For any quasi de Sitter background, we show that a recently proposed scalar weak gravity conjecture (sWGC) follows from the swampland distance conjecture, together with the covariant entropy bound. While pointing out the limitations of our…
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…
Infinite distance limits in the moduli space of a quantum gravity theory are characterized by having infinite towers of states becoming light, as dictated by the Distance Conjecture in the Swampland program. These towers imply a drastic…
As famously observed by Ooguri and Vafa nearly twenty years ago, scalar field moduli spaces in quantum gravity appear to exhibit various universal features. For instance, they seem to be infinite in diameter, have trivial fundamental group,…
We show that constraints on scalar field potentials and towers of light massive states in asymptotic limits of scalar field space (as posited by the de Sitter Conjecture and the Swampland Distance Conjecture, respectively) are correlated…
The quantum gravity conjectures that aim to separate the landscape from the swampland among the low energy theories were originally formulated in the context of scalar field spaces spanned by moduli. Because these conjectures have…
In this note we consider whether there could be Swampland constraints associated to the presence of fermions in the theory. We propose that any fermion must couple to an infinite tower of states, and that the mass scale of this tower, in…
The swampland conjectures seek to distinguish effective field theories which can be consistently embedded in a theory of quantum gravity from those which can not (and are hence referred to as being in the swampland). We consider two such…
Motivated by the early discovery of the gigantic landscape of string theory vacua, in recent years people switched direction to try to find constraints on low energy effective field theories from UV-complete descriptions for example quantum…
We propose a new swampland conjecture stating that the limit of vanishing gravitino mass corresponds to the massless limit of an infinite tower of states and to the consequent breakdown of the effective field theory. We test our proposal in…
The Swampland Distance Conjecture claims that effective theories derived from a consistent theory of quantum gravity only have a finite range of validity. This will imply drastic consequences for string theory model building. The refined…
Motivated by the swampland dS conjecture, we consider a rolling scalar field as the source of dark energy. Furthermore, the swampland distance conjecture suggests that the rolling field will lead at late times to an exponentially light…