Related papers: Revisiting the Refined Distance Conjecture
Gravitational wave (GW) constraints have recently been used to significantly restrict models of dark energy and modified gravity. New bounds arising from GW decay and GW-induced dark energy instabilities are particularly powerful in this…
It is known that there are AdS vacua obtained from compactifying the SM to 2 or 3 dimensions. The existence of such vacua depends on the value of neutrino masses through the Casimir effect. Using the Weak Gravity Conjecture, it has been…
A satisfactory theory of quantum gravity may necessitate a drastic modification of our perception of space-time, by giving it a foamy structure at distances comparable to the Planck length. It is argued in this essay that the experimental…
The weak gravity conjecture has been proposed as a criterion to distinguish the landscape from the swampland in string theory. As an application in cosmology of this conjecture, we use it to impose theoretical constraint on parameters of…
We invoke probe brane arguments to classify the asymptotic behavior of general five-dimensional supergravity theories with eight supercharges near infinite distance boundaries of the vector multiplet moduli space. Imposing consistency of…
We study the implications on inflation of an infinite tower of higher-spin states with masses falling exponentially at large field distances, as dictated by the Swampland Distance Conjecture. We show that the Higuchi lower bound on the mass…
A surprising connection between the weak gravity conjecture and cosmic censorship has recently been proposed. In particular, it was argued that a promising class of counterexamples to cosmic censorship in four-dimensional…
Phenomenological approaches to quantum gravity try to infer model-independent laws by analyzing thought experiments and combining both quantum, relativistic, and gravitational ingredients. We first review these ingredients -three basic…
In this paper we formulate a conjecture which partially generalizes the Gross-Kohnen-Zagier theorem to higher weight modular forms. For f in S_k(N) satisfying certain conditions, we construct a map from the Heegner points of level N to a…
In this note, we prove that for all five-dimensional supergravities arising from M-theory compactified on a Calabi-Yau threefold, points of vanishing gauge coupling lie at infinite distance in the moduli space. Conversely, any point at…
The accelerated expansion of the universe demands presence of an exotic matter, namely the dark energy. Though the cosmological constant fits this role very well, a scalar field minimally coupled to gravity, or quintessence, can also be…
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 derive a computable closed-form upper bound on the Hausdorff distance between a truncated minimal robust positively invariant (mRPI) set and its infinite-horizon limit. The bound depends only on a disturbance-set size measure and an…
It is argued that quantum gravity has an interpretation as a topological field theory provided a certain constraint from the path intergral measure is respected. The constraint forces us to couple gauge and matter fields to gravity for…
Special theory of relativity has been formulated in a vacuum momentum-energy representation which is equivalent to Einstein special relativity and predicts just the same results as it. Although in this sense such a formulation would be at…
Models of large-field inflation based on axion-like fields with shift symmetries can be simple and natural, and make a promising prediction of detectable primordial gravitational waves. The Weak Gravity Conjecture is known to constrain the…
We revisit the Emergence Proposal in the vector multiplet moduli space of type IIA N=2 supersymmetric string vacua in four dimensions, for which the string tree-level prepotential and the string one-loop correction are exactly known via…
We show that a subgroup of the modular group of M-theory compactified on a ten torus, implies the Lorentzian structure of the moduli space, that is usually associated with naive discussions of quantum cosmology based on the low energy…
A generic class of string theories predicts the existence of light moduli fields, and they are expected to have masses $m_\phi$ comparable to the gravitino mass $m_{3/2}$ which is in a range of $10^{-2}$keV--1GeV in gauge-mediated…
Five-vectors theory of gravity is proposed, which admits an arbitrary choice of the energy density reference level. This theory is formulated as the constraint theory, where the Lagrange multipliers turn out to be restricted to some class…