Related papers: Positivity of the gravitational path integral impl…
Theories such as massive Galileons and massive gravity can satisfy the presently known improved positivity bounds provided they are weakly coupled. We discuss the form of the EFT Lagrangian for a weakly coupled UV completion of massive…
It is known that the cosmological constant can be dynamically tuned to an arbitrary small value in classes of scalar tensor theories. The trouble with such schemes is that effective gravity itself vanishes. We explore the possibility of…
Several major open problems in cosmology, including the nature of inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, share a common structure: they involve spacetime-filling media with unknown microphysics, and can be probed so far only through their…
The wormhole contribution to the gravitational path integral may be interpreted as smooth remnant of correlations among the erratic large-$N$ behaviors of dual CFTs. In this work, we investigate this idea in (2+1)-dimensional gravity. We…
We construct traversable wormholes by starting with simple four-dimensional classical solutions respecting the null energy condition and containing a pair of oppositely charged black holes connected by a non-traversable wormhole. We then…
This thesis investigates traversable wormhole spacetimes in modified theories of gravity, where the matter at the wormhole throat is described by an anisotropic energy-momentum tensor. Wormhole solutions are constructed in the context of…
Within general relativity, we study spherically symmetric configurations with wormhole topology consisting of spinor fields and a Maxwell electric field. For such a system, we construct complete families of regular asymmetric solutions…
A spherically symmetric space-time solution for a diffusive two measures theory is studied. An asymmetric wormhole geometry is obtained where the metric coefficients have a linear term for galactic distances and the analysis of Mannheim and…
I briefly summarize a recent research program aiming to probe the landscape of low-energy phases of string theory from a global perspective. Borrowing conceptual lessons from the swampland program, I will discuss how the effective theories…
As shown in previous work, there is a well-defined nonperturbative gravitational path integral including an explicit sum over topologies in the setting of Causal Dynamical Triangulations in two dimensions. In this paper we derive a complete…
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 discuss, in the context of alternative theories of gravity with nonminimal coupling between matter and curvature, if inflationary solutions driven by a single scalar field can be reconciled with the swampland conjectures about the…
The Hilbert space formulation of interacting $s=1$ vector-potentials stands in an interesting contrast with the point-local Krein space setting of gauge theory. Already in the absence of interactions the Wilson loop in a Hilbert space…
We constrain effective field theories by going beyond the familiar positivity bounds that follow from unitarity, analyticity, and crossing symmetry of the scattering amplitudes. As interesting examples, we discuss the implications of the…
We study how meaningful physical predictions can arise in nonperturbative quantum gravity in a closed Lorentzian universe. In such settings, recent developments suggest that the quantum gravitational Hilbert space is one-dimensional and…
The weak gravity conjecture states that quantum gravity theories have to contain a charged state with a charge-to-mass ratio bigger than unity. By studying unitarity and causality constraints on higher derivative corrections to the…
In this work, we focus on the dynamics of a massive one-form field, \textbf{B}, often referred to simply as a vector field, that is minimally coupled to standard Einstein gravity. In the framework of four-dimensional spacetimes, the theory…
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…
We discover a weak-gravity bound in scalar-gravity systems in the asymptotic-safety paradigm. The weak-gravity bound arises in these systems under the approximations we make, when gravitational fluctuations exceed a critical strength.…
The weak gravity conjecture imposes severe constraints on natural inflation. A trans-Planckian axion decay constant can only be realized if the potential exhibits an additional (subdominant) modulation with sub-Planckian periodicity. The…