Related papers: Stringballs and Planckballs for Dark Matter
We combine old and new quantum field theoretic arguments to show that any theory of stable or metastable higher spin particles can be coupled to gravity only when the gravity sector has a stringy structure. Metastable higher spin particles,…
Confining gauge theories contain glueballs and mesons with arbitrary spin, and these particles become metastable at large $N$. However, metastable higher spin particles, when coupled to gravity, are in conflict with causality. This tension…
If dark matter couples directly to a light force mediator, then it may form bound states in the early universe and in the non-relativistic environment of haloes today. In this work, we establish a field-theoretic framework for the…
According to common lore, massive elementary higher spin particles lead to inconsistencies when coupled to gravity. However, this scenario was not completely ruled out by previous arguments. In this paper, we show that in a theory where the…
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…
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…
Particles in a yet unexplored dark sector with sufficiently large mass and small gauge coupling may form purely gravitational atoms (quantum gravitational bound states) with a rich phenomenology. In particular, we investigate the…
We conjecture a general upper bound on the strength of gravity relative to gauge forces in quantum gravity. This implies, in particular, that in a four-dimensional theory with gravity and a U(1) gauge field with gauge coupling g, there is a…
We study the possibility of elementary energy quanta with vacuum propagation speed w < c, capable of interacting with each other to form massive bound states. The slow matter thus formed is shown to follow laws of Special Relativity…
Motivated by astrophysical observations of excess electronic production in the galaxy, new theoretical models of the dark matter sector have been proposed in which the Standard model couples to the dark matter sector through an attractive…
The linearized Einstein theory in the approximately flat time-space is modified accounting for a massive graviton as a dark matter in the universe. On the basis of magnetic-type Maxwell- Proca -Vlasov equations, the interactions of the…
We study two interacting quantum particles forming a bound state in $d$-dimensional free space, and constrain the particles in $k$ directions to $(0,\infty)^k \times \mathbb{R}^{d-k}$, with Neumann boundary conditions. First, we prove that…
A new dark sector consisting of a pure non-abelian gauge theory has no renormalizable interaction with SM particles, and can thereby realise gravitational Dark Matter (DM). Gauge interactions confine at a scale $\Lambda_{\rm DM}$ giving…
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…
In this dissertation, we review the study of quark and monopole bound-state potentials within the gauge/gravity correspondence. Their behaviors often differ from what is expected on general physical grounds and field-theory considerations.…
We discuss some peculiar properties of the stochastic graviton background predicted by string cosmology. At Planckian times, for the values of the parameters of the model which are more interesting for the detection in gravitational wave…
We study the pair creation of point-particles and strings in a time-dependent, weak gravitational field. We find that, for massive string states, there are surprising and significant differences between the string and point-particle…
Realizing dark energy and the observed de Sitter spacetime in quantum gravity has proven to be obstructed in most every usual approach. We argue that additional degrees of freedom of the left- and right-movers in string theory and a…
We argue that part of "dark matter" is not made of matter, but of the singular world-surfaces in the solutions of Einstein's vacuum field equation G_{\mu\nu}=0. Their Einstein-Hilbert action governs also their quantum fluctuation. It…
A strongly-coupled sector can feature a supercooled confinement transition in the early universe. We point out that, when fundamental quanta of the strong sector are swept into expanding bubbles of the confined phase, the distance between…