Related papers: Duality and Supersymmetry Constraints on the Weak …
We consider a general class of quantum gravity-inspired, modified gravity theories, where the Einstein-Hilbert action is extended through the addition of all terms quadratic in the curvature tensor coupled to scalar fields with standard…
Using an argument due to Regge and Teitelboim, an expression for the ADM mass of 2d quantum dilaton gravity is obtained. By evaluating this expression we establish that the quantum theories which can be written as a Liouville-like theory,…
Motivated by the apparent dependence of string $\sigma$--models on the sum of spacetime metric and antisymmetric tensor fields, we reconsider gravity theories constructed from a nonsymmetric metric. We first show that all such "geometrical"…
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 derive a relativistic field equation for the trace of the metric perturbation beyond the weak field approximation to the Einstein field equations. The dynamics is governed by a massive Klein-Gordon equation on curved space-time, where…
Gravitational positivity bounds provide consistency conditions for effective field theories with gravity. They turn out to be phenomenologically useful by providing lower bounds in parameters of new physics beyond the Standard Models (BSM).…
The standard model of elementary particles (SM) suffers from various problems, such as power-law ultraviolet (UV) sensitivity, exclusion of general relativity (GR), and absence of a dark matter candidate. The LHC experiments, according to…
Positivity bounds on scattering amplitudes provide a necessary condition for a low-energy effective field theory to have a consistent ultraviolet completion. Their extension to gravity theories has been studied in the past years aiming at…
Stringent Swampland conjectures aimed at effective theories containing massive abelian vectors have recently been proposed (arXiv:1808.09966), with striking phenomenological implications. In this article, we show how effective theories that…
Effective field theories are constrained by the requirement that their constituents never move superluminally on non-trivial backgrounds. In this paper, we study time delays experienced by photons propagating on charged shockwave…
We explore the cosmic censorship in the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theory following Wald's thought experiment to destroy a black hole by throwing in a test particle. We discover that at probe limit the extremal charged dilaton black hole…
Positivity bounds - the consequences of requiring a unitary, causal, local UV completion - place strong restrictions on theories of dark energy and/or modified gravity. We derive and investigate such bounds for Horndeski scalar-tensor…
Physical principles such as unitarity, causality, and locality can constrain the space of consistent effective field theories (EFTs) by imposing two-sided bounds on the allowed values of Wilson coefficients. In this paper, we consider the…
We investigate the interplay of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) and the Weak Cosmic Censorship Conjecture (WCCC) in $F(R)$-Euler-Heisenberg black holes in Anti-de Sitter and de Sitter backgrounds. The solution is characterized by the…
Scattering amplitudes mediated by graviton exchange display IR singularities in the forward limit. This obstructs standard application of positivity bounds based on twice subtracted dispersion relations. Such divergences can be cancelled…
The initial idea underlying the Weak Gravity Conjecture is that extremal black holes must always be "unstable", in the sense that they should slowly decay by emitting either particles or smaller black holes. Here we show that, when this…
The detection of gravitational waves from binary black holes sources has opened the possibility to search for electric charges and "dark" charges on black holes, the latter being candidates for dark matter. This requires theoretical…
There are strong reasons to believe that global symmetries of quantum theories cannot be exact in the presence of gravity. While this has been argued at the qualitative level, establishing a quantitative statement is more challenging. In…
Ultralight scalar dark matter may couple to the Standard Model through dimension-five operators that contain the field-strength tensors of the gauge interactions. Recent progress in nuclear clocks is projected to increase the sensitivity to…
We show that the recently proposed weak gravity conjecture\cite{AMNV0601} can be extended to a class of scalar field theories. Taking gravity into account, we find an upper bound on the gravity interaction strength, expressed in terms of…