Related papers: Cobordism Classes and the Swampland
We propose quantum gravitational constraints on effective four-dimensional theories with N=1 supersymmetry. These Swampland constraints arise by demanding consistency of the worldsheet theory of a class of axionic, or EFT, strings whose…
We consider quintessence models within 4D effective descriptions of gravity coupled to two scalar fields. These theories are known to give rise to viable models of late-time cosmic acceleration without any need for flat potentials, and so…
We point out that the swampland conjectures, forbidding the presence of global symmetries and (meta-)stable de Sitter vacua within quantum gravity, pick up a dynamical axion for the electroweak SU(2) gauge theory as a natural candidate for…
We point out that pure supergravity theories in $AdS$ with enough supersymmetry lead, upon taking the large radius limit, to flat space quantum gravities with a nonperturbatively exact global symmetry, and are therefore in the Swampland.…
We present a consistency condition for 8d ${\cal N} = 1$ supergravity theories with non-trivial global structure $G/Z$ for the non-Abelian gauge group, based on an anomaly involving the $Z$ 1-form center symmetry. The interplay with other…
Dynamical quantum field theories (QFTs), such as those in which spacetimes are equipped with a metric and/or a field in the form of a smooth map to a target manifold, can be formulated axiomatically using the language of…
We explore the notion of approximate global symmetries in quantum field theory and quantum gravity. We show that a variety of conjectures about quantum gravity, including the weak gravity conjecture, the distance conjecture, and the…
Motivated by the early discovery of the gigantic landscape of string theory vacua, in recent years people switched direction to try to find constraints on low energy effective field theories from UV-complete descriptions for example quantum…
We consider string/M-theory reductions on a compact space $X=X^\text{loc} \cup X^\circ$, where $X^\text{loc}$ contains the singular locus, and $X^\circ$ its complement. For the resulting supergravity theories, we construct a suitable…
The three tachyon-free non-supersymmetric string theories in ten dimensions provide a handle on quantum gravity away from the supersymmetric lamppost. However, they have not been shown to be fully consistent; although local anomalies cancel…
Non-invertible symmetries in quantum field theory (QFT) generalize the familiar product rule of groups to a more general fusion rule. In many cases, gauged versions of these symmetries can be regarded as dual descriptions of invertible…
There have been many attempts to construct de Sitter space-times in string theory. While arguably there have been some successes, this has proven challenging, leading to the de Sitter swampland conjecture: quantum theories of gravity do not…
Present day physics rests on two main pillars: General relativity and quantum field theory. We discuss the deep and at the same time problematic interplay between these two theories. Based on an argument by Doplicher, Fredenhagen, and…
We discuss aspects of global and gauged symmetries in quantum field theory and quantum gravity, focusing on discrete gauge symmetries. An effective Lagrangian description of $\Z_p$ gauge theories shows that they are associated with an…
On the basis of a number of Swampland conditions, we argue that the Hilbert space of baby universe states must be one-dimensional in a consistent theory of quantum gravity. This scenario may be interpreted as a type of "Gauss's law for…
Cobordism offers a unique perspective into the non-perturbative sector of string theory by demanding the absence of higher form global symmetries for quantum gravitational consistency. In this work we compute the spin cobordism groups of…
This paper is devoted to the analysis of charged superselection sectors in the framework of the locally covariant quantum field theories. We shall analize sharply localizable charges, and use net-cohomology of J.E. Roberts as a main tool.…
The transcendental expectation of string theory is that the nature of the fundamental forces, particle spectra and masses, together with coupling constants, is uniquely determined by mathematical and logical consistency, non-empirically,…
Recently, various swampland conjectures have been proposed that every UV complete effective field theory should satisfy. In particular, these deal with the properties of AdS and dS solutions arising in theories of quantum gravity. Mainly…
We investigate swampland conjectures for quantum gravity in the context of M-theory compactified on Calabi-Yau threefolds which admit infinite sequences of flops. Naively, the moduli space of such compactifications contains paths of…