Related papers: EFT & Species Scale: Friends or foes?
The concept of the species scale as the quantum gravity cut-off has been recently emphasised in the context of the Swampland program. Along these lines, we continue the quest for a precise understanding of its role within effective field…
This thesis investigates the role of the quantum gravity cut-off for effective field theories (EFTs) coupled to Einstein gravity, with an emphasis on its implications at low energies within the context of the Swampland program. Part I…
We present a novel way in which effective field theory (EFT) can break down in cosmological string backgrounds depending on the behavior of the quantum gravity cutoff in infinite distance limits, known as the species scale $\Lambda_s$.…
Quantum gravity (QG) has a natural cutoff given by the Planck scale $M_{\rm pl}$. However, it is known that the EFT of gravity can break down at a lower scale, the species scale $\Lambda_s\lesssim M_{\rm pl}$, if there are light species of…
Recently there has been an interesting revival of the idea to use large extra dimensions to address the dark energy problem, exploiting the (true) observation that towers of states with masses split, by $M^2_N = f(N) m^2,$ with $f$ an…
The Swampland Distance Conjecture (SDC) states that, for any infinite-distance limit in the moduli space of a quantum gravity effective field theory (EFT), there should exist an infinite tower of states that become exponentially light.…
Infinite distance limits in the moduli space of a quantum gravity theory are characterized by having infinite towers of states becoming light, as dictated by the Distance Conjecture in the Swampland program. These towers imply a drastic…
I review the effective field theory (EFT) description of gravitating compact objects. The focus is on kinematic regimes where gravity is perturbative, in particular the adiabatic inspiral phase relevant to gravitational wave detection. For…
In this note we consider whether there could be Swampland constraints associated to the presence of fermions in the theory. We propose that any fermion must couple to an infinite tower of states, and that the mass scale of this tower, in…
Quantum gravitational effects become significant at a cut-off species scale that can be much lower than the Planck scale whenever we get a parametrically large number of fields becoming light. This is expected to occur at any perturbative…
Weak gravity conjecture can be formulated as a statement that gravity must be the weakest force, compared to the other interactions in low energy effective field theory (EFT). Several arguments in favor of this statement were presented from…
As a cutoff scale of quantum gravity, the species scale can be defined by the scale at which the perturbativity of the non-renormalizable gravitational interaction begins to break down. Since it is determined by the number of species in the…
The scale at which quantum gravity becomes manifest, the species scale $\Lambda_s$, has recently been argued to take values parametrically lower than the Planck scale. We use black holes of vanishing horizon area (small black holes) in…
The species scale $\Lambda_s\leq M_{pl}$ serves as a UV cutoff in the gravitational sector of an EFT and can depend on the moduli of the theory as the spectrum of the theory varies. We argue that the dependence of the species scale…
Effective field theory is a powerful organizing principle that allows to describe physics below a certain scale model-independently. Above that energy scale, identified with the cutoff, the EFT description breaks down and new physics is…
We investigate the scalar perturbations and the possible strong coupling issues of $f(T)$ around a cosmological background, applying the effective field theory (EFT) approach. We revisit the generalized EFT framework of modified…
Effective field theory (EFT) approaches are widely used at the LHC, such that it is important to study their validity, and ease of matching to specific new physics models. In this paper, we consider an extension of the SM in which a top…
As a quantum gravity cut-off, the species scale $\Lambda_s$ gets naturally compared to the energy scale of a scalar potential $V$ in an EFT. In this note, we compare the species scale, its rate $|\nabla \Lambda_s|/\Lambda_s$ and their field…
The 'Species Scale' has proved to be an important concept when studying consistent effective actions in Quantum Gravity. This is a short summary of my contribution to the Corfu Summer Institute in September 2025, in which I covered two…
By applying the Covariant Entropy Bound (CEB) to an EFT in a box of size $1/\Lambda_{\text{IR}}$ one obtains that the UV and IR cut-offs of the EFT are necessarily correlated. We argue that in a theory of Quantum Gravity (QG) one should…