Related papers: Towards a Swampland Global Symmetry Conjecture usi…
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…
We view and provide further evidence for a number of Swampland criteria, including the Weak Gravity Conjecture, Distance Conjecture and bounds on the finiteness of the quantum gravity vacua from the prism of the finiteness of black hole…
We conjecture a general upper bound on the strength of gravity relative to gauge forces in quantum gravity. This implies, in particular, that in a four-dimensional theory with gravity and a U(1) gauge field with gauge coupling g, there is a…
Quantum gravitational effects become significant at a cut-off species scale that can be much lower than the Planck scale whenever we get a parametrically large number of fields becoming light. This is expected to occur at any perturbative…
We analyze causality and unitarity constraints in graviton scattering amplitudes, aiming to establish new bounds on theories with $U(1)$-gravitational anomalies, such as axion models or strongly-coupled gauge theories. For this purpose, we…
Global symmetries are expected to be violated by gravity, which may cause a serious problem to models based on these symmetries. A famous example is the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem in QCD axion models; it requires a…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) posits that gravity must be the weakest force in any consistent theory of quantum gravity. Originally formulated to constrain the landscape of effective field theories arising from string theory, the WGC…
Generalized symmetries and their spontaneous breakdown serve as the fundamental concept to constrain the many-body entanglement structure, which allows us to characterize quantum phases of matter and emergent collective excitations. For…
The gravitational path integral can compute inner products between different states of open and closed universes. To have a well-defined Hilbert space, these inner products should be positive semi-definite, which is not manifest in the…
We consider the gravitational correction to the coupling of the scalar fields. Weak gravity conjecture says that the gravitational correction to the running of scalar coupling should be less than the contribution from scalar fields. For…
We argue that in theories of quantum gravity with discrete gauge symmetries, e.g. $\textbf{Z}_k$, the gauge couplings of U$(1)$ gauge symmetries become weak in the limit of large $k$, as $g\to k^{-\alpha}$ with $\alpha$ a positive order 1…
It is widely believed that consistent theories of quantum gravity satisfy two basic kinematic constraints: they are free from any global symmetry, and they contain a complete spectrum of gauge charges. For compact, abelian gauge groups,…
We find constrained instantons in Einstein gravity with and without a cosmological constant. These configurations are not saddle points of the Einstein-Hilbert action, yet they contribute to non-perturbative processes in quantum gravity. In…
In six dimensions, there is an exotic $\mathcal{N}=(4,0)$ supermultiplet that contains only fields of spin $\leq 2$, but no graviton, and that on a circle reduces to 5D $\mathcal{N}=4$ supergravity. It has been proposed that, if suitable…
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.…
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…
We consider effective theories with massive fields that have spins larger than or equal to two. We conjecture a universal cutoff scale on any such theory that depends on the lightest mass of such fields. This cutoff corresponds to the mass…
The no-global-symmetries conjecture is central to the swampland program that delineates the boundary between effective field theories that can be obtained from a quantum theory of gravity to those that cannot. The conjecture states that…
In this paper we use the AdS/CFT correspondence to refine and then establish a set of old conjectures about symmetries in quantum gravity. We first show that any global symmetry, discrete or continuous, in a bulk quantum gravity theory with…
We discuss a topological reason why global symmetries are not conserved in quantum gravity, at least when the symmetry comes from compactification of a higher form symmetry. The mechanism is purely topological and does not require any…