Related papers: The Absolute Swampland
An overview is given of the way in which the unification program of particle physics has evolved into the proposal of superstring theory as a prime candidate for unifying quantum gravity with the other forces and particles of nature. A key…
The Swampland Distance Conjecture claims that effective theories derived from a consistent theory of quantum gravity only have a finite range of validity. This will imply drastic consequences for string theory model building. The refined…
Recently a swampland criterion has been proposed that rules out de Sitter vacua in string theory. Such a criterion should hold at all points in the field space and especially at points where the system is on-shell. However there has not…
We study the conformally reduced $R+R^2$ theory of gravity and we show that the theory is asymptotically safe with an ultraviolet critical manifold of dimension three. In particular, we discuss the universality properties of the fixed point…
Entanglement entropies calculated in the framework of quantum field theory on classical, flat or curved, spacetimes are known to show an intriguing area law in four dimensions, but they are also notorious for their quadratic ultraviolet…
Fundamental principles of local quantum field theory or of quantum gravity can enforce consistency requirements on the space of consistent low-energy effective field theories. We survey the various techniques that have been used to put UV…
In this letter, we consider effective field theories for light fields transforming under the fundamental or adjoint representation of a continuous group. We demonstrate that in the presence of gravity, crossing symmetry combined with two…
We analyze the anomaly constraints on 6D supergravity theories with a single abelian U(1) gauge factor. For theories with charges restricted to $q = \pm1, \pm2$ and no tensor multiplets, anomaly-free models match those models that can be…
We view and provide further evidence for a number of Swampland criteria, including the Weak Gravity Conjecture, Distance Conjecture and bounds on the finiteness of the quantum gravity vacua from the prism of the finiteness of black hole…
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 review the advanced version of the KKLT construction and pure $d=4$ de Sitter supergravity, involving a nilpotent multiplet, with regard to various conjectures that de Sitter state cannot exist in string theory. We explain why we…
Some problems in finding a complete quantum theory incorporating gravity are discussed. One is that of giving a consistent unitary description of high-energy scattering. Another is that of giving a consistent quantum description of…
Generalized global symmetries are a common feature of many quantum field theories decoupled from gravity. By contrast, in quantum gravity / the Swampland program, it is widely expected that all global symmetries are either gauged or broken,…
It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in…
We clearly formulate and study further a conjecture of effective field theory interaction with gravity in the cosmological context. The conjecture stems from the fact that the melding of quantum theory and gravity typically indicates the…
We consider effective theories with massive fields that have spins larger than or equal to two. We conjecture a universal cutoff scale on any such theory that depends on the lightest mass of such fields. This cutoff corresponds to the mass…
The quantum gravity conjectures that aim to separate the landscape from the swampland among the low energy theories were originally formulated in the context of scalar field spaces spanned by moduli. Because these conjectures have…
We use the S-matrix bootstrap to carve out the space of unitary, crossing symmetric and supersymmetric graviton scattering amplitudes in ten dimensions. We focus on the leading Wilson coefficient $\alpha$ controlling the leading correction…
We show how uncertainty in the causal structure of field theory is essentially inevitable when one includes quantum gravity. This includes the fact that lightcones are ill-defined in such a theory. This effect is small in the effective…
In the context of $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity without vector multiplets coupled to hypermultiplets, the coupling constant of graviphoton $\tau$ is apriori a free parameter. Stringy realization of this and using a mathematical conjecture…