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We use mirror symmetry to establish the first concrete arena of spacetime topology change in string theory. In particular, we establish that the {\it quantum theories} based on certain nonlinear sigma models with topologically distinct…
The construction of meta-stable four-dimensional de Sitter vacua in type IIB string compactifications represents an important question and an ongoing area of work. There is considerable support both for stringy de Sitter vacua in the…
Recent observations seem to indicate that we live in a universe whose spatial sections are nearly or exactly flat. Motivated by this we study the problem of observational detection of the topology of universes with flat spatial sections. We…
The recent result of Strominger, Yau and Zaslow relating mirror symmetry to the quantum field theory notion of T-duality is reinterpreted as providing a way of geometrically characterizing which Calabi-Yau manifolds have mirror partners.…
Dynamical cobordisms implement the swampland cobordism conjecture in the framework of effective field theory, realizing codimension 1 end of the world (ETW) branes as singularities at finite spacetime distance at which scalars diverge to…
Motivated by the Weak Gravity Conjecture, we uncover an intricate interplay between black holes, BPS particle counting, and Calabi-Yau geometry in five dimensions. In particular, we point out that extremal BPS black holes exist only in…
The KKLT scenario in a warped throat, if consistent, provides a concrete counterexample to both the AdS scale separation and the dS swampland conjectures. First, we define and analyze the relevant effective field theory for the conifold…
In theories with moduli, extremal black holes behave such that for generic initial conditions, the distance traveled by the scalars from infinity to the horizon can grow with the size of the black hole. This, in turn, implies that larger…
Multiply-connected Calabi-Yau threefolds are of particular interest for both string theorists and mathematicians. Recently it was pointed out that one of the generic degenerations of these spaces (occurring at codimension one in moduli…
Towers of electrically and magnetically charged states in quantum gravity often exhibit two important properties. First, the ratio of the mass (or tension) of electrically charged states to magnetically charged states is of order…
We discuss some aspects of perturbative $(0,2)$ Calabi-Yau moduli space. In particular, we show how models with different $(0,2)$ data can meet along various sub-loci in their moduli space. In the simplest examples, the models differ by the…
Field space geometry plays a central role within the Swampland Programme, most notably in the various Distance Conjectures. However, for gravitational EFTs, this geometry is not uniquely defined: one can cast the action in many synonymous…
We revisit and extend the correspondence between black holes, domain walls and fluxes in type IIA compactifications. We argue that these three systems can be described by the same supergravity effective action, modulo proper identifications…
We investigate the swampland distance conjecture in higher-spin gravity. To this end, we study multicritical generalizations of large-$N$ vector models, bosonic and fermionic, and we compute the quantum information distance along selected…
A shift symmetry is a ubiquitous ingredient in inflationary models, both in effective constructions and in UV-finite embeddings such as string theory. It has also been proposed to play a key role in certain Dark Energy and Dark Matter…
The minimal Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) predicts the emergence of towers of superextremal states in both weak and strong coupling limits. In this work, we study M-theory compactified on a special class of Calabi-Yau threefolds to…
We introduce symplectic Calabi-Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, it implies that any exact filling of the standard unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the…
The possibility of having discrete degrees of freedom at singularities associated to `conifolds with discrete torsion' is studied. We find that the field theory of D-brane probes near these singularities is identical to ordinary conifolds,…
We investigate a stronger formulation of Webb's conjecture on the contractibilty of the orbit space of the p-subgroup complexes in terms of finite topological spaces. The original conjecture, which was first proved by Symonds and, more…
The manifold hypothesis, which assumes that data lies on or close to an unknown manifold of low intrinsic dimension, is a staple of modern machine learning research. However, recent work has shown that real-world data exhibits distinct…