Related papers: Finiteness and the Swampland
What are the conditions on a field theoretic model leading to a finite entanglement entropy density? We prove two very general results: 1) Ultraviolet finiteness of a theory does not guarantee finiteness of the entropy density; 2) If the…
In this essay, we argue that certain aspects of the measurement require revision in Quantum Gravity. Using entropic arguments, we propose that the number of measurement outcomes and the accuracy (or the range) of the measurement are limited…
Motivated by the desire to improve our understanding of the Weak Gravity Conjecture, we compute the one-loop correction of charged particles to the geometry and entropy of extremal black holes in 4d. We find that fermion loops provide…
I summarize the basic ideas and formalism of loop quantum gravity. I illustrate the results on the discrete aspects of quantum geometry and two applications of these results to black hole physics. In particular, I discuss in detail a…
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…
We propose the use of a gravitational uncertainty principle for gravitation. We define the corresponding gravitational Planck's constant and the gravitational quantum of mass. We define entropy in terms of the quantum of gravity with the…
The "swampland conjectures" have been recently suggested as a set of criteria to assess if effective field theories (EFTs) are consistent with a quantum gravity embedding. Such criteria, which restrict the behavior of scalar fields in the…
We discuss the Swampland Distance Conjecture in the framework of black hole thermodynamics. In particular, we consider black holes in de Sitter space and we show that the Swampland Distance Conjecture is a consequence of the fact that…
A personal perspective on the black hole evaporation process is presented using as guidelines inputs from: (i) loop quantum gravity, (ii) simplified models where concrete results have been obtained, and, (iii) semi-classical quantum general…
We consider three fundamental issues in quantum gravity: (a) the black hole information paradox (b) the unboundedness of entropy that can be stored inside a black hole horizon (c) the relation between the black hole horizon and the…
The various entropy bounds that exist in the literature suggest that spacetime is fundamentally discrete, and hint at an underlying relationship between geometry and "information". The foundation of this relationship is yet to be uncovered,…
We present a simple quantum description of the gravitational collapse of a ball of dust which excludes those states whose width is arbitrarily smaller than the gravitational radius of the matter source and supports the conclusion that black…
A key test of any quantum theory of gravity is its ability to reproduce the known thermodynamic properties of black holes. A statistical mechanical description of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy once seemed remote, but today we suffer an…
Simple arguments related to the entropy of black holes strongly constrain the spectrum of the area operator for a Schwarzschild black hole in loop quantum gravity. In particular, this spectrum is fixed completely by the assumption that the…
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 propose a generalisation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The proposal is guided by properties of extremal black holes in ${\cal N}=2$ supergravity, but can be understood more generally in terms of…
In this paper we propose a quantum version of the swampland conjecture. We argue that quantum instabilities of de Sitter space discovered using field theoretical methods, are directly related to the difficulties in finding stringy de Sitter…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture holds that in a theory of quantum gravity, any gauge force must mediate interactions stronger than gravity for some particles. This statement has surprisingly deep and extensive connections to many different…
We prove that higher-dimension operators contribute positively to the entropy of a thermodynamically stable black hole at fixed mass and charge. Our results apply whenever the dominant corrections originate at tree level from quantum field…
Black holes in equilibrium and the counting of their entropy within Loop Quantum Gravity are reviewed. In particular, we focus on the conceptual setting of the formalism, briefly summarizing the main results of the classical formalism and…