Related papers: Sharpening the Distance Conjecture in Diverse Dime…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture holds that gravity must be the weakest force. This is true of the familiar forces in our own universe -- electromagnetism, for instance, is many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. But the bold claim of…
Our intuitive understanding of cosmic structure formation works best in scales small enough so that bound, relaxed gravitating systems are no longer adjusting their radius; and large enough so that space and matter follow the average…
Recently we have presented a new physical model that links the maximum speed of light with the minimal Planck scale into a maximal-acceleration Relativity principle in phase spaces . The maximal proper-acceleration bound is $a = c^2/…
Gauge theories and perturbative gravity in four dimensions are governed by a tower of infinite-dimensional symmetries which arise from tree-level soft theorems. However, aside from the leading soft theorems which are all-loop exact,…
We conjecture an intrinsic UV cutoff for the validity of the effective field theory with a large number of species coupled to gravity. In four dimensions such a UV cutoff takes the form $\Lambda=\sqrt{\lambda/ N}M_p$ for $N$ scalar fields…
The cosmological constant ($\Lambda$), i.e., the energy density stored in the true vacuum state of all existing fields in the Universe, is the simplest and the most natural possibility to describe the current cosmic acceleration. However,…
We investigate the asymptotic Tower Weak Gravity Conjecture in weak coupling limits of open string theories with minimal supersymmetry in four dimensions, focusing for definiteness on gauge theories realized on 7-branes in F-theory.…
We study particle theories that have a tower of worldline internal degrees of freedom. Such a theory can arise when the worldsheet of closed strings is dimensionally reduced to a worldline, in which case the tower is infinite with regularly…
We study the Swampland Distance Conjecture for supersymmetric theories with AdS${}_5$ backgrounds and fixed radius through their $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFT holographic duals. By the Maldacena-Zhiboedov theorem, around a large class of…
We test various conjectures about quantum gravity for six-dimensional string compactifications in the framework of F-theory. Starting with a gauge theory coupled to gravity, we analyze the limit in K\"ahler moduli space where the gauge…
Recent results have shown that a field non-minimally coupled to the electromagnetic Lagrangian can induce a violation of the Einstein equivalence principle. { This kind of coupling is present in a very wide class of gravitation theories.}…
I provide some simple physical arguments that, once gravitation and some subtleties are taken into account, rather broad classes of potentials result in instantons which tunnel relatively rapidly between perturbatively stable minima. In…
We adapt an argument of Tao and Vu to show that if $\lambda_1\le\cdots\le\lambda_d$ are the successive minima of an origin-symmetric convex body $K$ with respect to some lattice $\Lambda<\mathbb{R}^d$, and if we set…
We consider the problem of digitalizing Euclidean segments. Specifically, we look for a constructive method to connect any two points in $\mathbb{Z}^d$. The construction must be {\em consistent} (that is, satisfy the natural extension of…
We sharpen the known inequalities $A \Lambda \le 4\pi (1-g)$ and $A\ge 4\pi Q^2$ between the area $A$ and the electric charge $Q$ of a stable marginally outer trapped surface (MOTS) of genus g in the presence of a cosmological constant…
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…
Recently Gambini and Pullin proposed a new consistent discrete approach to quantum gravity and applied it to cosmological models. One remarkable result of this approach is that the cosmological singularity can be avoided in a general…
We point out that the physics at the extreme IR---cosmology---might provide tests of the physics of the extreme UV---the Weak Gravity Conjecture. The current discrepancies in the determination of $H_0$ may hint at a modification of…
We challenge the widespread belief, originated by Newton and Wigner (Rev. Mod. Phys, 21, 400 (1949)) that the incorporation of special relativity into quantum mechanics implies that a massive particle cannot be localized within an…
In this paper we study the observational constraints that can be imposed on the coupling parameter, $\hat \alpha$, of the regularized version of the 4-dimensional Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity. We use the scalar-tensor field…