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Related papers: Spin-2 and the Weak Gravity Conjecture

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We employ on-shell methods to construct scattering amplitudes and derive effective theories involving massive spin-3/2 fermions interacting with spin 0, 1 and 2 bosons. The four-point massive amplitudes are constructed using an…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-07-18 Tony Gherghetta , Wenqi Ke

Several recent works have claimed that the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) excludes super-Planckian displacements of axion fields, and hence large-field axion inflation, in the absence of monodromy. We argue that in theories with $N\gg1$…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-09-01 Thomas C. Bachlechner , Cody Long , Liam McAllister

Within the known landscape of quantum gravity, most theories satisfy the Lattice Weak Gravity Conjecture (LWGC), which requires a superextremal particle at every site in the electric charge lattice $\Gamma$. However, counterexamples to the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2026-03-06 Matthew Reece , Tom Rudelius

The Weak Gravity Conjecture has recently been re-formulated in terms of a particle with non-negative self-binding energy. Because of the dual conformal field theory (CFT) formulation in the anti-de Sitter space the conformal dimension…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-01-19 Oleg Antipin , Jahmall Bersini , Francesco Sannino , Zhi-Wei Wang , Chen Zhang

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…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-11-15 Ben Heidenreich , Matthew Reece , Tom Rudelius

It was pointed out long ago by Vainshtein [Phys. Lett. 39B, 393 (1972)] that the weak-field perturbation expansion of generic theories (of the nonlinear Fierz-Pauli type) involving massive spin-2 excitations breaks down below a certain…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2020-03-18 Vasilisa Nikiforova

Models of large-field inflation based on axion-like fields with shift symmetries can be simple and natural, and make a promising prediction of detectable primordial gravitational waves. The Weak Gravity Conjecture is known to constrain the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-01-27 Ben Heidenreich , Matthew Reece , Tom Rudelius

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…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2018-11-01 Alfredo Urbano

Self-interacting massive particles with spin $\geq 1$ unavoidably violate unitarity; the question is at what scale. For spin-$1$ the strong coupling scale (at which perturbative unitarity is lost) cannot be raised by any finite tuning of…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2020-03-18 Scott Melville , Diederik Roest , David Stefanyszyn

Dual field theory realisations are given for linearised gravity in terms of gauge fields in exotic representations of the Lorentz group. The field equations and dual representations are discussed for a wide class of higher spin gauge…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2010-02-03 C. M. Hull

In this study, we investigate the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) in the context of quantum-corrected AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom (AdS-RN) black holes within Kiselev spacetime. Our focus is on photon spheres, which serve as markers for stable and…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2025-12-25 Mohammad Reza Alipour , Mohammad Ali S. Afshar , Saeed Noori Gashti , Jafar Sadeghi

Connections between weak gravity conjecture (WGC) bounds and scattering positivity have been extensively studied over the past decade. This work further explores these connections by proposing positivity as a potential amplitude criterion…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-05-08 Tran Quang Loc

We demonstrate that the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) and the Festina-Lente Conjecture (FLC) yield novel bounds on fifth force searches and milli-Charged Particles (mCPs), as well as on the scale of inflation and on the effective Higgs…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2026-03-18 Fayez Abu-Ajamieh , Pratik Chattopadhyay , Nobuchika Okada , Roman Pasechnik , Zhi-Wei Wang

We explore the prospects for bounding the weak scale using the weak gravity conjecture (WGC), addressing the hierarchy problem by violating the expectations of effective field theory. Building on earlier work by Cheung and Remmen, we…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2019-10-02 Nathaniel Craig , Isabel Garcia Garcia , Seth Koren

In this paper we consider Quadratic Gravity as a low energy effective field theory of some unknown UV-complete theory of gravity. Using the spin-2 ghost pathology that occurs in Quadratic Gravity, we derive maximum value for the classical…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2021-04-08 Callum Hunter

We find a new class of theories of massive gravity with five propagating degrees of freedom where only rotations are preserved. Our results are based on a non-perturbative and background-independent Hamiltonian analysis. In these theories…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2015-06-15 Denis Comelli , Fabrizio Nesti , Luigi Pilo

In a recent paper [1], it was introduced a new class of gravitational theories with two local degrees of freedom. The existence of these theories apparently challenges the distinctive role of general relativity as the unique non-linear…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2018-10-30 Raúl Carballo-Rubio , Francesco Di Filippo , Stefano Liberati

We argue that the gauge $SL(2N,C)$ theories may point to a possible way where the known elementary forces, including gravity, could be consistently unified. Remarkably, while all related gauge fields are presented in the same adjoint…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2023-10-18 J. L. Chkareuli

Curvature squared terms, when added to the Einstein-Hilbert action and treated non-perturbatively, generically result in the propagation of an extra massive scalar state and an extra massive spin-2 ghost state. Using the Stueckelberg trick,…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-04-27 Kurt Hinterbichler , Mehdi Saravani

A surprising connection between the weak gravity conjecture and cosmic censorship has recently been proposed. In particular, it was argued that a promising class of counterexamples to cosmic censorship in four-dimensional…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2019-07-17 Toby Crisford , Gary T. Horowitz , Jorge E. Santos