Related papers: Modular Fluxes, Elliptic Genera, and Weak Gravity …
In recent papers, it has been shown that (i) the dynamics of theories involving gravity can be described, in the vicinity of a spacelike singularity, as a billiard motion in a region of hyperbolic space bounded by hyperplanes; and (ii) that…
We spell out the derivation of novel features, put forward earlier in a letter, of two dimensional gravity in the strong coupling regime, at $C_L=7$, 13, 19. Within the operator approach previously developed, they neatly follow from the…
We investigate the lifting of half-maximal four-dimensional gauged supergravities to compactifications of string theory. It is shown that a class of such supergravities can arise from compactifications of IIA string theory on manifolds of…
We study towers of light particles that appear in infinite-distance limits of moduli spaces of 9-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=1$ string theories, some of which notably feature decompactification limits with running string coupling. The lightest…
In this talk I summarize several recent results concerning the four-dimensional effective supergravity obtained using a Calabi-Yau compactification of the $E_8\times E_8$ heterotic string from M-theory. A simple macroscopic study is…
We construct the 4D N=1 supergravity which describes the low-energy limit of 6D supergravity compactified on a sphere with a monopole background a la Salam and Sezgin. This provides a simple setting sharing the main properties of realistic…
In this Thesis we investigate properties of stability, rigidity and unitarity of the string landscape in ten and lower dimensions. The dissertation explores these aspects by intertwining a detailed analysis of string vacua, with and without…
The strong coupling dynamics of string theories in dimension $d\geq 4$ are studied. It is argued, among other things, that eleven-dimensional supergravity arises as a low energy limit of the ten-dimensional Type IIA superstring, and that a…
In the framework of N=1 supersymmetric string models given by the heterotic string on an elliptic Calabi-Yau $\pi :Z\ra B$ together with a SU(n) bundle we compute the chiral matter content of the massless spectrum. For this purpose the net…
The cosmological observations provide a strong evidence that there is a positive cosmological constant in our universe and thus the spacetime is asymptotical de Sitter space. The conjecture of gravity as the weakest force in the…
We study asymptotically flat stationary solutions of four-dimensional supergravity theories via the associated G/H* pseudo-Riemannian non-linear sigma models in three spatial dimensions. The Noether charge C associated to G is shown to…
We study ultraviolet cutoffs associated with the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) and Sublattice Weak Gravity Conjecture (sLWGC). There is a magnetic WGC cutoff at the energy scale $e G_N^{-1/2}$ with an associated sLWGC tower of charged…
The (4,0) supermultiplet in 6 dimensions contains a 4th rank tensor gauge field with the symmetries of the Riemann tensor and is superconformal, with 32+32 supersymmetries. Dimensional reduction on a circle gives the 5D N=8 supergravity…
M2 branes suspended between adjacent parallel M5 branes lead to light strings, the `M-strings'. In this paper we compute the elliptic genus of M-strings, twisted by maximally allowed symmetries that preserve 2d (2,0) supersymmetry. In a…
We find de Sitter and flat space solutions with all moduli stabilized in four dimensional supergravity theories derived from the heterotic and type II string theories, and explain how all the previously known obstacles to finding such…
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 show that four-dimensional $\mathcal N=1$ effective theories of gravity obtained from string compactifications require a non-perturbative completion, as additional light states of non-perturbative origin must be incorporated in the small…
We present holographic arguments to predict properties of strongly coupled gravitational systems in terms of weakly coupled gauge theories. In particular we relate the latest computed value for the Choptuik critical exponent in black hole…
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…
In this paper we continue to study a class of four-dimensional gravity models with n Abelian vector fields and Sp(2n)/U(n) coset of scalar fields. This class contains General Relativity (n=0) and Einstein-Maxwell dilaton-axion theory (n=1),…