Related papers: Swampland Conjectures for an Almost Topological Gr…
Einsteinian cubic gravity provides a holographic toy model of a nonsupersymmetric CFT in three dimensions, analogous to the one defined by Quasi-topological gravity in four. The theory admits explicit non-hairy AdS$_4$ black holes and…
We sharpen Swampland constraints on 8d supergravity theories by studying consistency conditions on worldvolume theory of 3-brane probes. Combined with a stronger form of the cobordism conjecture, this leads to the reconstruction of the…
A large class of $\Lambda < 0$ cosmologies have big-bang / big crunch spacetimes with time-symmetric backgrounds and asymptotically AdS Euclidean continuations suggesting a possible holographic realization. We argue that these models…
The three-dimensional pure quantum gravity with negative cosmological constant is supposed to be dual to the extremal conformal field theory of central charge $c=24k$ in two dimensions. We employ the conformal bootstrap method to analyze…
A static wormhole solution for gravity in vacuum is found for odd dimensions greater than four. In five dimensions the gravitational theory considered is described by the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet action where the coupling of the quadratic term…
There have been many attempts to construct de Sitter space-times in string theory. While arguably there have been some successes, this has proven challenging, leading to the de Sitter swampland conjecture: quantum theories of gravity do not…
The proposal that a strong coupling limit of the five-dimensional type II string theory (M-theory compactified on a 6-torus) in which the Planck length becomes infinite could give a six-dimensional superconformal phase of M-theory is…
Monte Carlo studies of pure glue SU(3) gauge theory using the overlap-based topological charge operator have revealed a laminar structure in the QCD vacuum consisting of extended, thin, coherent, locally 3-dimensional sheets of topological…
We study relativistic particle, string and membrane theories as defining field theories containing gravity in (0+1), (1+1) and (2+1) spacetime dimensions respectively. We show how an off shell invariance of the massless particle action…
We lift the recently proposed theories of higher-spin self-dual Yang-Mills (SDYM) and gravity (SDGR) to the twistor space. We find that the most natural room for the twistor formulation of these theories is not in the projective, but in the…
We review the theory of higher spin gauge fields in 2+1 and 3+1 dimensional anti-de Sitter space and present some new results on the structure of higher spin currents and explicit solutions of the massless equations. A previously obtained…
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…
In this work, we investigate the existence of string theory solutions with a $d$-dimensional (quasi-) de Sitter spacetime, for $3 \leq d \leq 10$. Considering classical compactifications, we derive no-go theorems valid for general $d$. We…
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 consider three dimensional gravity with a positive cosmological constant and non- zero gravitational Chern-Simons term. This theory has inflating de Sitter solutions and local metric degrees of freedom. The Euclidean signature partition…
We propose a supergravity model that contains elements recently shown to arise in the strongly-coupled limit of the $E_8\times E_8$ heterotic string (M-theory), including a no-scale--like K\"ahler potential, the identification of the string…
We consider Einstein gravity coupled to an n-form field strength in D dimensions. Such a theory cannot be supersymmetrized in general, we nevertheless propose a pseudo-Killing spinor equation and show that the AdS X Sphere vacua have the…
Topologically massive Yang-Mills theory is studied in the framework of geometric quantization. Since this theory has a mass gap proportional to the topological mass m, Yang-Mills contribution decays exponentially at very large distances…
Tensionless string theory on $\text{AdS}_3\times\text{S}^3\times\mathcal{M}$ is explored in the limit that the strings wind the asymptotic boundary a large number of times. Although the worldsheet is usually thought to be localised to the…
Compactifying the Standard Model (SM) on a circle may lead to AdS 3D vacua, depending on the character (Majorana or Dirac) and the mass of the lightest neutrino. It has been shown that, imposing the Ooguri-Vafa conjecture that no stable…