Related papers: The weak gravity conjecture in perturbative string…
The cosmological observations provide a strong evidence that there is a positive cosmological constant in our universe and thus the spacetime is asymptotical de Sitter space. The conjecture of gravity as the weakest force in the…
We derive the geodesic equation of motion in the presence of weak gravitational fields produced by relativistic sources such as cosmic strings, decomposed into scalar, vector and tensor parts. We find that the vector (gravito-magnetic)…
The Axion Weak Gravity Conjecture provides one of the most effective quantum gravity tools for constraining particle physics and cosmology, but it has long been thought of as a slightly fuzzy statement: given an axion with decay constant…
We show that almost all string theories, including the bosonic string, the superstring and $W$-string theories, possess a twisted N=2 superconformal symmetry. This enables us to establish a connection between topological gravity and the…
The weakly coupled vacuum of E_8 x E_8 heterotic string theory remains a promising candidate for the underlying theory of the Standard Model. The particle spectrum and the issue of dilaton stabilization are reviewed. Specific models for…
We conjecture that there exists a strong coupling limit of bosonic string theory which is related to the 26 dimensional theory in the same way that 11 dimensional M theory is related to superstring theory. More precisely, we believe that…
We combine old and new quantum field theoretic arguments to show that any theory of stable or metastable higher spin particles can be coupled to gravity only when the gravity sector has a stringy structure. Metastable higher spin particles,…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) was proposed to constrain Effective Field Theories (EFTs) with Abelian gauge symmetry coupled to gravity. In this article, I study the WGC from low energy observers' perspective, and revisit the issue of to…
Superstring theory involves a single unifying superstring current for bosons and fermions that in the low-energy limit generalizes the Klein-Gordon (not the Dirac) current. By adopting a relativistic-covariant probabilistic interpretation…
We correlate the weak gravity conjecture (WGC), the KSS conjecture with chemical potential at extremality and the central charges by going through a particular example in five dimensional AdS spacetime with two unknown coefficients $c_1,…
We prove a version of the Weak Gravity Conjecture for 6d F-theory or heterotic string compactifications with 8 supercharges. This sharpens our previous analysis by including massless scalar fields. The latter are known to modify the Weak…
The First and Second Swampland Conjectures (FSC & SSC) are substantially modified in non-critical string cosmology, in which cosmic time is identified with the time-like Liouville mode of the supercritical string. In this scenario the…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture predicts that in quantum gravity there should exist overcharged states, that is states with charge larger than their mass. Extending this to large masses and charges, we are expecting similar overcharged…
Common features of known quantum gravity theories may hint at the general nature of quantum gravity. The absence of continuous global symmetries is one such feature. This inspired the Weak Gravity Conjecture, which bounds masses of charged…
I discuss the recent progress in bypassing the KPZ barrier for the existence of nonperturbative bosonic strings in $1<d<25$. I consider string anomalies which emerge from higher terms of the DeWitt-Seeley expansion as $\varepsilon \times…
We propose a new version of the scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) which would apply to any scalar field coupled to quantum gravity. For a single scalar it is given by the differential constraint $V''\leq…
The mild form of the Weak Gravity Conjecture states that quantum or higher-derivative corrections should decrease the mass of large extremal charged black holes at fixed charge. This allows extremal black holes to decay, unless protected by…
In this talk I review recent developments in superstring theory. In the first half of the talk I discuss some of the earlier developments in this subject. This includes a review of the status of string theory as a unified theory of gravity…
The black hole weak gravity conjecture (WGC) is a set of linear inequalities on the four-derivative corrections to Einstein--Maxwell theory. Remarkably, in four dimensions, these combinations appear in the $2 \to 2$ photon amplitudes,…
We study the modifications on the metric of an isolated self-gravitating bosonic superconducting cosmic string in a scalar-tensor gravity in the weak-field approximation. These modifications are induced by an arbitrary coupling of a…