Related papers: The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as t…
It has been recently argued that Higgsing of theories with $U(1)^n$ gauge interactions consistent with the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) may lead to effective field theories parametrically violating WGC constraints. The minimal examples…
In theories with a large number N of particle species, black hole physics imposes an upper bound on the mass of the species equal to M_{Planck}/\sqrt{N}. This bound suggests a novel solution to the hierarchy problem in which there are N…
We consider gravity coupled to a massive field whose Compton's wavelength is far larger than the Planck's length. In the low energy effective action for gravity, thus, it is the perturbation in the Compton's wavelength that breaks first as…
I review the present theoretical attempts to understand the quantum properties of spacetime. In particular, I illustrate the main achievements and the main difficulties in: string theory, loop quantum gravity, discrete quantum gravity…
I review some recent work (done in collaboration with G. Veneziano) which clarifies the existence of a correspondence between self-gravitating fundamental string states and Schwarzschild black holes. The main result is a detailed…
We study some conditions for the hierarchy $m_{3/2} << M_P$ to occur naturally in a generic effective supergravity theory. Absence of fine-tuning and perturbative calculability require that the effective potential has a sliding gravitino…
We give a brief overview of the string landscape and techniques used to construct string compactifications. We then explain how this motivates the notion of the swampland and review a number of conjectures that attempt to characterize…
We propose a new swampland conjecture stating that the limit of vanishing gravitino mass corresponds to the massless limit of an infinite tower of states and to the consequent breakdown of the effective field theory. We test our proposal in…
Common wisdom associates all the unraveled and theoretically challenging aspects of gravity with its UV-completion. However, there appear to be few difficulties afflicting the effective framework for gravity already at low energy, that are…
Recent developments in string theory suggest that string theory landscape of vacua is vast. It is natural to ask if this landscape is as vast as allowed by consistent-looking effective field theories. We use universality ideas from string…
We discuss string theory relations between gravity and gauge theory tree amplitudes. Together with $D$-dimensional unitarity, these relations can be used to perturbatively quantize gravity theories, i.e. they contain the necessary…
We propose a framework where the string scale as well as all compact dimensions are at the electroweak scale $\sim$ TeV$^{-1}$. The weakness of gravity is attributed to the small value of the string coupling $g_s \sim 10^{-16}$, presumably…
We propose an alternative theory of gravity which assumes that background geometry of the Universe is fixed four dimensional Euclidean space and gravity is a vector field $A_k$ in this space which breaks the Euclidean symmetry. Direction of…
Currently, string theory represents the only advanced approach to a unification of all interactions, including gravity. In spite of the more than thirty years of its existence it did not make any empirically testable predictions. And it is…
Positivity bounds coming from consistency of UV scattering amplitudes are in general insufficient to prove the weak gravity conjecture for theories beyond Einstein-Maxwell. Additional ingredients about the UV may be necessary to exclude…
The black hole information paradox forces us into a strange situation: we must find a way to break the semiclassical approximation in a domain where no quantum gravity effects would normally be expected. Traditional quantizations of gravity…
Four-dimensional strings with the standard model gauge group $SU(3)\times SU(2)\times U(1)$ give model-dependent predictions for the tree level weak mixing-angle. In the presence of an extra pseudo-anomalous gauged- ${U(1)}_X$, the value of…
We argue, that in Einsteinian gravity the Planck length is the shortest length of nature, and any attempt of resolving trans-Planckian physics bounces back to macroscopic distances due to black hole formation. In Einstein gravity…
Inserting a varying Lambda in Einstein's field equations can be made consistent with the Bianchi identities by allowing for torsion, without the need to add scalar field degrees of freedom. In the minimal such theory, Lambda is totally free…
We analyze the one-loop effects of massive fields on 2-to-2 scattering processes involving gravitons. It has been suggested that in the presence of gravity, any local effective field theory description must break down at the "species…