Related papers: The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as t…
We present a complete proof of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in any perturbative bosonic string theory in spacetime dimension $D\ge6$. Our proof works by relating the black hole extremality bound to long range forces, which are more easily…
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…
The weak gravity conjecture suggests that, in a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity, the strength of gravity is bounded from above by the strengths of the various gauge forces in the theory. In particular, this intriguing conjecture…
String theory avoids the ultraviolet infinities that arise in trying to quantize gravity. It is also more predictive than conventional quantum field theory, one aspect of this being the way that it contributed to the emergence of the…
In a gravitational theory with a massless photon the maximum charge-to-mass ratio of black holes approaches the prediction of the Einstein-Maxwell theory as black hole mass increases: $Q_{\rm ext}/M =1+ \alpha/M^2$ for some constant…
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…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture postulates the existence of superextremal charged particles, i.e. those with mass smaller than or equal to their charge in Planck units. We present further evidence for our recent observation that in known…
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…
We explain the need for a theory of quantum gravity and some general ideas about string theory, including the idea of the derivation of the Hawking Bekenstein entropy formula for extremal black holes. We then give a general description of…
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,…
We present a semiclassical proof of the weak gravity conjecture in $D = 4$ spacetime dimensions for scalar matter gauged under a $U(1)^N$ gauge group. We compute the non-perturbative macroscopic entropy of a scalar field in an extremal…
We propose a generalisation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The proposal is guided by properties of extremal black holes in ${\cal N}=2$ supergravity, but can be understood more generally in terms of…
We explore possible extensions of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) to scalar field theories. To avoid charged black hole remnants, the WGC requires the existence of a particle with a mass $m < g q M_P$, with charge $q$ and U(1) gauge…
In this semi-technical review we discuss string theory (and all that goes by that name) as a framework for a quantum theory of gravity. This is a new paradigm in theoretical physics that goes beyond relativistic quantum field theory. We…
We study universal features of the density of one-particle states $\rho(E)$ in weakly coupled theories of gravity at energies above the quantum gravity cutoff $\Lambda$, defined as the scale suppressing higher-derivative corrections to the…
In the presence of large extra dimensions, the fundamental Planck scale can be much lower than the apparent four-dimensional Planck scale. In this setup, the weak gravity conjecture implies a much more stringent constraint on the UV cutoff…
In recent literature, it has been argued that a mild form of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) is satisfied by wide classes of effective field theories in which higher-derivative corrections can be shown to shift the charge-to-mass ratios…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture holds that in a theory of quantum gravity, any gauge force must mediate interactions stronger than gravity for some particles. This statement has surprisingly deep and extensive connections to many different…
We conjecture an intrinsic UV cutoff for the validity of the effective field theory with a large number of species coupled to gravity. In four dimensions such a UV cutoff takes the form $\Lambda=\sqrt{\lambda/ N}M_p$ for $N$ scalar fields…
This is a broad-brush review of how string theory addresses several important questions of gravitational physics. The problem of non-renormalizability is first reviewed, followed by introduction of string theory as an ultraviolet-finite…