Related papers: Tensionless String Limits in 4d Conformal Manifold…
We extend recent remarkable progress in the comparison of the dynamical energy spectrum of rotating closed strings in AdS_5xS^5 and the scaling weights of the corresponding non-near-BPS operators in planar N=4 supersymmetric gauge theory.…
In any consistent effective field theory of quantum gravity limits of infinite field distance are expected to lead to the EFT breakdown due to the appearance of an infinite tower of light states, as predicted by the Distance Conjecture. We…
We provide further motivation for the string lamppost principle in 9d supergravities. Using a blend of ideas which includes Swampland conjectures, finiteness of black hole entropy, and classification of SCFTs, we show that infinite distance…
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…
Swampland criteria like the Weak Gravity Conjecture should not only apply to particles, but also to other lower-codimension charged objects in 4d EFTs like strings and membranes. However, the description of the latter is in general subtle…
Motivated by the possibility of formulating a strings/black hole correspondence in AdS space, we extract the Hagedorn behavior of thermal AdS_3 bosonic string from 1-loop partition function of SL(2,R) WZW model. We find that the Hagedorn…
In previous works, ratios among four-point scattering amplitudes at the leading order in the high-energy limit were derived for the bosonic open string theory. The derivation was based on Ward identities derived from the decoupling of…
What is the space of weakly-coupled, gravitational theories which contain massive, higher-spin particles? This class of theories is highly constrained and it is conjectured their ultraviolet completion must be string theory. We provide more…
The thermodynamics of type IIB superstring theory in the maximally supersymmetric plane wave background is studied. We compute the thermodynamic partition function for non-interacting strings exactly and the result differs slightly from…
We study the behavior of a simple string bit model at finite temperature. We use thermal perturbation theory to analyze the high temperature regime. But at low temperatures we rely on the large $N$ limit of the dynamics, for which the exact…
We consider closed type II and orientifold backgrounds where supersymmetry is spontaneously broken by asymmetric geometrical fluxes. We show that these can be used to describe thermal ensembles with chemical potentials associated to…
We show that whenever a 4-dimensional theory with N particle species emerges as a consistent low energy description of a 3-brane embedded in an asymptotically-flat (4+d)-dimensional space, the holographic scale of high-dimensional gravity…
We demonstrate that weakly coupled, large N, d-dimensional SU(N) gauge theories on a class of compact spatial manifolds (including S^{d-1} \times time) undergo deconfinement phase transitions at temperatures proportional to the inverse…
We treat free large N superconformal field theories as holographic duals of higher spin (HS) gauge theories expanded around AdS spacetime with radius R. The HS gauge theories contain massless and light massive AdS fields. The HS current…
We study strings associated with minimal 6d SCFTs, which by definition have only one string charge and no Higgs branch. These theories are labelled by a number n with 1 <= n <= 8 or n = 12. Quiver theories have previously been proposed…
We construct and study several examples of continuous families of AdS$_4$ $\mathcal N = 1$ solutions of four-dimensional maximal gauged supergravity. These backgrounds provide the holographic descriptions of conformal manifolds of the dual…
We show that the non-gravitational sectors of certain 6d and 5d supergravity theories can be decomposed into superconformal field theories (SCFTs) which are coupled together by pairwise identifying and gauging mutual global symmetries. In…
We discuss the worldsheet sigma-model whose target space is the $d+1$ dimensional Euclidean Schwarzschild black hole. We argue that in the limit where the Hawking temperature of the black hole, $T$, approaches the Hagedorn temperature,…
6-dimensional superconformal field theories are exotic and fascinating. They emerge from compactifications of F-theory on Calabi-Yau elliptic fibrations, which grants them a rich array of dualities with various other formulations of string…
In this long overdue second installment, we continue to develop the conformal bootstrap program for ${\mathcal N}=4$ superconformal field theories in four dimensions via an analysis of the correlation function of four stress-tensor…