Related papers: Density of States, Black Holes and the Emergent St…
Asymptotically massless towers of species are ubiquitous in the string landscape when infinite-distance limits are approached. Due to the remarkable properties of string dualities, they always comprise Kaluza-Klein states or higher-spin…
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 examine the minimal constraints imposed by the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) on the particle spectrum of a quantum gravity theory. Towers of super-extremal states have previously been argued to be required for consistency of the WGC…
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…
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…
The breakdown of gravitational effective field theories is intimately connected to the emergence of infinite towers of light states near infinite-distance limits in field space. In string theory, up to duality frame, such towers arise from…
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…
In a gravitational theory with a massless photon the maximum charge-to-mass ratio of black holes approaches the prediction of the Einstein-Maxwell theory as black hole mass increases: $Q_{\rm ext}/M =1+ \alpha/M^2$ for some constant…
To explain black hole thermodynamics in quantum gravity, one must introduce constraints to ensure that a black hole is actually present. I show that for a large class of black holes, such ``horizon constraints'' allow the use of conformal…
Upon investigating asymptotic regimes of the F-theory moduli space, we verify that a tower of light states arises as predicted by the Distance Conjecture. Specifically, we provide a geometric classification of the infinite distance limits…
We consider unitary and weakly coupled theories of gravity that extend Einstein gravity and reduce to it asymptotically at large distances. Our discussion is restricted to such theories that, similarly to Einstein gravity, contain black…
Based on Quantum Gravity arguments, it has been suggested that all kinetic terms of light particles below the UV cut-off could arise in the IR via quantum (loop) corrections. These loop corrections involve infinite towers of states becoming…
We discuss further our proposed modification of the Susskind-Horowitz-Polchinski scenario in which black hole entropy goes over to string entropy as one scales the string length scale up and the string coupling constant down, keeping…
I review some recent work (done in collaboration with G. Veneziano) which clarifies the existence of a correspondence between self-gravitating fundamental string states and Schwarzschild black holes. The main result is a detailed…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture postulates the existence of superextremal charged particles, i.e. those with mass smaller than or equal to their charge in Planck units. We present further evidence for our recent observation that in known…
Following the work of Sen, we consider the correspondence between extremal black holes and string states in the context of the entropy. We obtain and study properties of electrically charged black hole backgrounds of tree level heterotic…
We give a rigorous proof that in any free quantum field theory with a finite group global symmetry $\mathrm{G}$, on a compact spatial manifold, at sufficiently high energy, the density of states $\rho_\alpha(E)$ for each irreducible…
In this paper we use Euclidean gravity to derive a simple formula for the density of black hole microstates which transform in each irreducible representation of any finite gauge group. Since each representation appears with nonzero…
In 1997, an extension of general relativity was proposed that predicts the dark energy density \Lambda\ to vary linearly with the total number of macroscopic black holes in the universe. We explore this prediction and find that \Lambda\…
We argue that, for generic string compactifications, dark energy is likely to signal the beginning of the end of our universe, perhaps even through decompactification, with possible implications for the cosmological coincidence problem.…