Related papers: Towards a Swampland Global Symmetry Conjecture usi…
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 suggest a new explanation for the observed large scale flatness, homogeneity and isotropy of the universe. The basic ingredients are elementary and well-known, namely Einstein's theory of gravity and Hawking's method of computing…
We study the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The Weak Gravity Conjecture is a consistency condition for a theory of quantum gravity asserting that for a U(1) gauge field, there is a particle charged under this…
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…
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…
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…
In this note we show that models of natural inflation based on closed string axions are incompatible with the weak gravity conjecture (WGC). Specifically, we use T-duality in order to map the bounds on the charge-to-mass ratio of particles…
We propose a new swampland conjecture stating that the limit of vanishing gravitino mass corresponds to the massless limit of an infinite tower of states and to the consequent breakdown of the effective field theory. We test our proposal in…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) is a proposed constraint on theories with gauge fields and gravity, requiring the existence of light charged particles and/or imposing an upper bound on the field theory cutoff $\Lambda$. If taken as a…
The required absence of global symmetries in quantum gravity has been used to imply that all non-compact gauge theories are in the swampland. This argument stems from the idea that non-compact gauge symmetries always seem to be accompanied…
A low-energy effective theory is said to be in the swampland if it does not have any consistent UV completion inside a theory of quantum gravity. The natural question is if the standard model of particle physics, possibly with some minimal…
All global symmetries are expected to be explicitly broken by quantum gravitational effects, and yet may play an important role in Particle Physics and Cosmology. As such, any evidence for a well-preserved global symmetry would give insight…
We conjecture and present evidence that any effective field theory coupled to gravity in flat space admits at most a finite number of fine tunings, depending on the amount of supersymmetry and spacetime dimension. In particular, this means…
Causality constrains the gravitational interactions of massive higher spin particles in both AdS and flat spacetime. We explore the extent to which these constraints apply to composite particles, explaining why they do not rule out…
Recently, arguments for a refined de Sitter conjecture were put forward in arXiv:1810.05506. Using the large distance conjecture of arXiv:hep-th/0605264, the authors provide evidence for this dS conjecture in asymptotic regimes of field…
It is widely believed that exact global symmetries do not exist in theories that admit quantum black holes. Here we propose a way to quantify the degree of global symmetry violation in the Hawking radiation of a black hole by using certain…
The question whether global symmetries can be realized in quantum-gravity-matter-systems has far-reaching phenomenological consequences. Here, we collect evidence that within an asymptotically safe context, discrete global symmetries of the…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
For any quasi de Sitter background, we show that a recently proposed scalar weak gravity conjecture (sWGC) follows from the swampland distance conjecture, together with the covariant entropy bound. While pointing out the limitations of our…
We consider the swampland distance and de Sitter conjectures, of respective order one parameters $\lambda$ and $c$. Inspired by the recent Trans-Planckian Censorship conjecture (TCC), we propose a generalization of the distance conjecture,…