Related papers: Cobordism Classes and the Swampland
This mini-course, conducted at the XI School on Geometric, Algebraic, and Topological Methods in Quantum Field Theory held in Villa de Leyva, Colombia, provides an overview of the interconnection between generalized symmetries and…
We investigate the implications of string Swampland criteria for alternative theories of gravity. Even though this has not rigorously been proven, there is some evidence that exact de-Sitter solutions with a positive cosmological constant…
In the context of 4d effective gravity theories with 8 supersymmetries, we propose to unify, strenghten, and refine the several swampland conjectures into a single statement: the structural criterion, modelled on the structure theorem in…
We recall a classical theory of torsion gravity with an asymmetric metric, sourced by a Nambu-Goto + Kalb-Ramond string . We explain why this is a significant gravitational theory, and in what sense classical general relativity is an…
String theory, as a theory containing quantum gravity, is usually thought to require more dimensions of spacetime than the usual 3+1. Here I argue on physical grounds that needing extra dimensions for strings may well be an artefact of…
The paper concerns the fictitious entanglement of the so-called ``singularities'' in problems, pertaining to quantum gravity, due, in point of fact, to the way we try to employ, in that context, differential geometry, the latter being…
In this dissertation, we study the generalized symmetries in supergravities and superconformal field theories from the string theory perspective. Part one is devoted to the study of string universality in high spacetime dimensions.…
We review the advanced version of the KKLT construction and pure $d=4$ de Sitter supergravity, involving a nilpotent multiplet, with regard to various conjectures that de Sitter state cannot exist in string theory. We explain why we…
This article gives an elementary account of the recently proposed theory of spontaneous quantum gravity. It is argued that a viable quantum theory of gravity should be falsifiable, and hence it should dynamically explain the observed…
For d=10 N=1 SUGRA coupled to d=10 N=1 SYM, anomaly cancellation places severe constraints on the allowed gauge groups. Besides the ones known to appear in string theory, only U(1)^496 and E_8 x U(1)^248 are allowed. There are no known…
We propose Swampland constraints on consistent 5-dimensional ${\cal N}=1$ supergravity theories. We focus on a special class of BPS magnetic monopole strings which arise in gravitational theories. The central charges and the levels of…
We consider supergravity theories with 16 supercharges in Minkowski space with dimensions $d>3$. We argue that there is an upper bound on the number of massless modes in such theories depending on $d$. In particular we show that the rank of…
The Swampland Program aims to address the question, "when does an effective field theory model of quantum gravity have an ultraviolet complete embedding in string theory?", and can be regarded as a bottom-up approach to investigations of…
In this study, we investigate swampland conjectures within the setup of matter and non-metricity nonminimal coupling theories of gravity. We examine how the inflationary solution produced by a single scalar field can be resolved with the…
We demonstrate the validity of the String Lamppost Principle-that all consistent theories of quantum gravity are in the String Landscape-for supersymmetric theories in $d>6$ using compactness and connectedness of the moduli space of small…
We show that some higher derivative theories have a BRST symmetry. This symmetry is due to the higher derivative structure and is not associated to any gauge invariance. If physical states are defined as those in the BRST cohomology then…
A complete canonical formulation of general covariance makes it possible to construct new modified theories of gravity that are not of higher-curvature form, as shown here in a spherically symmetric setting. The usual uniqueness theorems…
The recent developments in string theory suggest that the space-time coordinates should be generalized to non-commuting matrices. Postulating this suggestion as the fundamental geometrical principle, we formulate a candidate for covariant…
General relativity is a deterministic theory with non-fixed causal structure. Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory with fixed causal structure. In this paper we build a framework for probabilistic theories with non-fixed causal…
We review various K-theory classification conjectures in string theory. Sen conjecture based proposals classify D-brane trajectories in backgrounds with no H flux, while Freed-Witten anomaly based proposals classify conserved RR charges and…