Related papers: Corrections to the CRV pattern
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…
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…
I review the relations between mass scales in various string theories and in M-theory. I discuss physical motivations and possible consistent realizations of large volume compactifications and low string scale. Large longitudinal…
Based on well-known properties of semi-classical black holes, we show that weakly-coupled string theory can be viewed as a theory of N = 1/g_s^2 particle species. This statement is a string theoretic realization of the fact that the…
The most natural expectation away from asymptotic limits in moduli space of supergravity theories is the desert scenario, where there are few states between massless fields and the quantum gravity cutoff. In this paper we initiate a…
A vast array of (metastable) vacuum solutions arise from string compactifications, each leading to different 4-d laws of physics. The space of these solutions, known as the string landscape, allows for an environmental solution to the…
The species scale provides a lower bound on the shortest possible length that can be probed in gravitational effective theories. It may be defined by the size of the minimal black hole in the theory and, as such, it has recently been given…
Light stops are a hallmark of the most natural realizations of weak-scale supersymmetry. While stops have been extensively searched for, there remain open gaps around and below the top mass, due to similarities of stop and top signals with…
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…
Species thermodynamics has been proposed in analogy to black hole thermodynamics. The entropy scales like an area and is given by the mere counting of the number of the species. In this work, we $\textit{derive}$ the constitutive relations…
One of the goals of the landscape program in string theory is to extract information about the space of string vacua in the form of statistical correlations between phenomenological features that are otherwise uncorrelated in field theory.…
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…
Castellano, Ruiz, and Valenzuela recently observed a remarkable "pattern" in infinite-distance limits of moduli spaces in quantum gravity, which relates the field space variation of the mass of the lightest tower of particles to the field…
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…
I review the arguments in favor of/against the traditional hypothesis that the Planck, string and compactification scales are all within a couple of orders of magnitude from each other. I explain how the extreme brane-world scenario, with…
We study infinite-distance limits in the moduli space of perturbative string vacua. The remarkable interplay of string dualities seems to determine a highly non-trivial dichotomy, summarized by the emergent string conjecture, by which in…
In this talk we discuss aspects of TeV-scale gravitational collapse to black holes and string balls and their subsequent evaporation. Special emphasis is placed on the interplay of the string/black hole correspondence principle. These ideas…
For most black holes in string theory, the Schwarzschild radius in string units decreases as the string coupling is reduced. We formulate a correspondence principle, which states that (i) when the size of the horizon drops below the size of…
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…
Recently, a number of authors have challenged the conventional assumption that the string scale, Planck mass, and unification scale are roughly comparable. It has been suggested that the string scale could be as low as a TeV. The greatest…