Related papers: Cobordism Classes and the Swampland
The U-dualities of maximally supersymmetric supergravity theories lead to celebrated non-perturbative constraints on the structure of quantum gravity. They can also lead to the presence of global symmetries since manifolds equipped with…
The cobordism conjecture of the swampland program states that the bordism group of quantum gravity must be trivial. We investigate this statement in several directions, on both the mathematical and physical side. We consider the Whitehead…
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…
In this note, we conjecture and provide evidence that quantum gravity cobordism classes are trivialized by elementary generators with tension at most order 1 in Planck units. Motivated by the attractor mechanism and a number of key…
The absence of global symmetries in a quantum gravity theory often requires the introduction of (new) symmetry-breaking defects, which appear as singular objects in the low-energy description. This has been formalized in the Cobordism…
We study the cobordism conjecture of McNamara and Vafa which asserts that the bordism group of quantum gravity is trivial. In the context of type IIB string theory compactified on a circle, this predicts the presence of D7-branes. On the…
The Swampland cobordism conjecture predicts various new objects in a theory with dynamical gravity. Applying this idea to the Standard Model of particle physics, a string object is predicted. We numerically constructed such an object as a…
In this work we investigate the Swampland Cobordism Conjecture in the context of type IIB string theory geometries with non-trivial duality bundle. Quite remarkably, we find that many non-trivial bordism classes with duality bundles in…
The ``Swampland Program'' aims to discriminate consistent-looking effective field theories that do not admit a UV completion in quantum gravity from those that do. While most often developed under the umbrella of string theory, several…
The Cobordism Conjecture states that any Quantum Gravity configuration admits, at topological level, a boundary ending spacetime. We study the dynamical realization of cobordism, as spacetime dependent solutions of Einstein gravity coupled…
It has been proposed that cobordism and K-theory groups, which can be mathematically related in certain cases, are physically associated to generalised higher-form symmetries. As a consequence, they should be broken or gauged in any…
We consider consequences of triviality of cobordism classes and anomaly cancellation in supergravity theories in $d>6$. We argue that this leads to the existence of certain defects which we call "I-folds" (a generalization of orientifolds).…
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 Swampland Cobordism Conjecture predicts the existence of end-of-the-world branes for every consistent Quantum Gravity theory, and domain walls connecting the Landscape. A perturbative string worldsheet description of these objects is…
We provide a conceptual assessment of some aspects of fundamental quantum field theories of gravity in light of foundational aspects of the swampland program. On the one hand, asymptotically safe quantum gravity may provide a simple and…
Non-trivial K-theory groups and non-trivial cobordism groups can lead to global symmetries which are conjectured to be absent in quantum gravity. Inspired by open-closed string duality, we propose a correspondence between the two groups,…
We make a number of conjectures about the geometry of continuous moduli parameterizing the string landscape. In particular we conjecture that such moduli are always given by expectation value of scalar fields and that moduli spaces with…
Sati and Schreiber [arXiv:2402.18473, arXiv:2512.12431] have proposed that charge quantisation in quantum field theory and string theory is governed by a homotopy type $\mathcal A$. We provide a refinement of this postulate, incorporating…
Generalized global symmetries are a common feature of many quantum field theories decoupled from gravity. By contrast, in quantum gravity / the Swampland program, it is widely expected that all global symmetries are either gauged or broken,…
We study the topological properties of bordisms interpolating between different 9d gauged supergravities obtained from compactification of type IIB string theory on $\mathbb{S}^1$ with a non-trivial $\mathsf{SL}(2,\mathbb{Z})$ bundle. We…