Related papers: Lectures on the Swampland Program in String Compac…
We derive universal scaling relations for the low-energy effective action of string theory, connecting the vacuum energy and gauge couplings to higher-derivative Wilson coefficients. At one-loop in string perturbation theory, these generic…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…
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…
These are lectures presented at the Les Houches Summer School ``Topology and Geometry in Physics'', July 1998. They provide a simple introduction to non perturbative methods of field theory in 1+1 dimensions, and their application to the…
The Swampland cobordism conjecture predicts various new objects in a theory with dynamical gravity. Applying this idea to the Standard Model of particle physics, a string object is predicted. We numerically constructed such an object as a…
This paper describes my talk given to the 27th Johns Hopkins Workshop: Symmetries and Mysteries of M Theory, G\"oteborg, Sweden, 24-26 August, 2003. After a brief introduction to the lightcone worldsheet formalism for summing the planar…
A method is presented by which a hidden N=2 superconformal symmetry can be exhibited in a string theory or indeed in a topological conformal field theory. More precisely, we present strong evidence, based on calculations with string…
The AdS/CFT correspondence provides quantum theories of gravity in which spacetime and gravitational physics emerge from ordinary non-gravitational quantum systems with many degrees of freedom. Recent work in this context has uncovered…
Perhaps the greatest challenge for fundamental theories based on compactification from extra dimensions is accommodating a period of accelerated cosmological expansion. Previous studies have identified constraints imposed by the existence…
String theoretical ideas might be relevant for particle physics model building. Ideally one would hope to find a unified theory of all fundamental interactions. There are only few consistent string theories in D=10 or 11 space-time…
These are lecture notes compiled for a short lecture series at the 2023 Condensed Matter Summer School at the University of Minnesota. They are designed to be conversational and fun, and not to take the place of review articles that do a…
In these lectures, two different aspects of brane world scenarios in 5d gravity or string theory are discussed. In the first two lectures, work on how warped compactifications of 5d gravity theories can change the guise of the hierarchy…
We use the S-matrix bootstrap to carve out the space of unitary, crossing symmetric and supersymmetric graviton scattering amplitudes in ten dimensions. We focus on the leading Wilson coefficient $\alpha$ controlling the leading correction…
We explore BPS strings in supergravity theories in six-dimensions and related Swampland Conjectures. We first propose a general modular ansatz for bootstrapping elliptic genera of 2d worldvolume theories on strings in the 6d theories. By…
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…
In this letter, we consider effective field theories for light fields transforming under the fundamental or adjoint representation of a continuous group. We demonstrate that in the presence of gravity, crossing symmetry combined with two…
The observation of a scalar resonance at the LHC, compatible with perturbative electroweak symmetry breaking, reinforces the Standard Model parameterisation of all subatomic data. The logarithmic evolution of the SM gauge and matter…
I discuss the role of quantum effects in the phenomenology of effective supergravity theories from compactification of the weakly coupled heterotic string. An accurate incorporation of these effects requires a regularization procedure that…
In this paper, we study the entanglement entropy in string theory in the simplest setup of dividing the nine dimensional space into two halves. This corresponds to the leading quantum correction to the horizon entropy in string theory on…
String theory avoids the ultraviolet infinities that arise in trying to quantize gravity. It is also more predictive than conventional quantum field theory, one aspect of this being the way that it contributed to the emergence of the…