Related papers: A Spin-2 Conjecture on the Swampland
A discussion of the field content of quadratic higher-derivative gravitation is presented, together with a new example of a massless spin-two field consistently coupled to gravity. The full quadratic gravity theory is shown to be equivalent…
Lorentz-invariant massive gravity is usually associated with a strong coupling scale $\Lambda_3$. By including non-trivial effects from the Stueckelberg modes, we show that about these vacua, one can push the strong coupling scale to higher…
Recent developments in string theory suggest that string theory landscape of vacua is vast. It is natural to ask if this landscape is as vast as allowed by consistent-looking effective field theories. We use universality ideas from string…
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…
We revisit the problem of constructing consistent interactions between a massive spin-3/2 field and a partially massless graviton in four-dimensional (A)dS spacetime. We use the Stueckelberg formulation of the action principle for these…
We consider the non-linear massive gravity as a theory of a number of St\"uckelberg scalar fields minimally coupled to the Einstein-Hilbert gravity and argue that the counting of degrees of freedom can be done for scalar theory and gravity…
As a cutoff scale of quantum gravity, the species scale can be defined by the scale at which the perturbativity of the non-renormalizable gravitational interaction begins to break down. Since it is determined by the number of species in the…
In the presence of large extra dimensions, the fundamental Planck scale can be much lower than the apparent four-dimensional Planck scale. In this setup, the weak gravity conjecture implies a much more stringent constraint on the UV cutoff…
We study the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The Weak Gravity Conjecture is a consistency condition for a theory of quantum gravity asserting that for a U(1) gauge field, there is a particle charged under this…
General relativity and quantum field theory are the cornerstones of our understanding of physical processes, from subatomic to cosmic scales. While both theories work remarkably well in their tested domains, they show minimal overlap.…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) bounds the mass of a particle by its charge. It is expected that this bound can not be below the ultraviolet cut-off scale of the effective theory. Recently, an extension of the WGC was proposed in the…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) is a proposed constraint on theories with gauge fields and gravity, requiring the existence of light charged particles and/or imposing an upper bound on the field theory cutoff $\Lambda$. If taken as a…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
The theory of a single massive graviton has a cutoff much below its Planck scale, because the extra modes from the graviton multiplet involve higher derivative self-interactions, controlled by a scale convoluted from the small graviton…
We present a systematic exposition of the Lagrangian field theory for the massive spin-two field generated in higher-derivative gravity. It has been noticed by various authors that this nonlinear field overcomes the well known inconsistency…
From the low-energy effective theory of dilatons, consistent with the scale anomaly, we calculate the $2\to2$ scattering amplitudes of dilatons. We find that the one-loop amplitude violates the unitarity bound as the scattering energy…
The soft breaking of gauge or other symmetries is the typical Quantum Field Theory phenomenon. In many cases one can apply the St$\ddot{\rm u}$ckelberg procedure, which means introducing some additional field or fields and restore the gauge…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture states that in any consistent theory of quantum gravity in the landscape of string theory, the repulsive force mediated by a U(1) gauge field must be stronger than the attractive force of gravity. In this work,…
We analyze scattering amplitudes with one soft external graviton and arbitrary number of other finite energy external states carrying arbitrary mass and spin to sub-subleading order in the momentum of the soft graviton. Our result can be…
We readdress the question of whether any universal upper bound exists on the square mass m^2 of the lightest scalar around a supersymmetry breaking vacuum in generic N=2 gauged supergravity theories for a given gravitino mass m_3/2 and…