Related papers: GRAVITY AND GLOBAL SYMMETRIES
Continuous global symmetries are expected to be broken by gravity, which can lead to important phenomenological consequences. A prime example is the threat that this poses to the viability of the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP…
It is widely believed and in part established that exact global symmetries are inconsistent with quantum gravity. One then expects that approximate global symmetries can be quantitatively constrained by quantum gravity or swampland…
QCD axion models have been proposed as a solution to the strong CP problem. QCD instanton effects explicitly violate the global U(1) Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry, and the axion potential is minimized at the CP conserving points. However, it…
We explore the notion of approximate global symmetries in quantum field theory and quantum gravity. We show that a variety of conjectures about quantum gravity, including the weak gravity conjecture, the distance conjecture, and the…
In this paper we study the consistency of generalized global symmetries in theories of quantum gravity, in particular string theory. Such global symmetries arise in theories with $(p+1)$-form gauge fields, and for spacetime dimension $d\leq…
Axions play a central role in inflationary model building and other cosmological applications. This is mainly due to their flat potential, which is protected by a global shift symmetry. However, quantum gravity is known to break global…
In axion-Maxwell theory at the minimal axion-photon coupling, we find non-invertible 0- and 1-form global symmetries arising from the naive shift and center symmetries. Since the Gauss law is anomalous, there is no conserved,…
We consider some questions of naturalness which arise when one considers conventional field theories in the presence of gravitation: the problem of global symmetries, the strong CP problem, and the cosmological constant problem. Using…
We argue that the presence of conformal anomalies in gravitational theories can lead to observable modifications to Einstein's equations via the induced anomalous effective actions, whose non-localities can overwhelm the smallness of the…
We draw attention to a class of generalized global symmetries, which we call "Chern-Weil global symmetries," that arise ubiquitously in gauge theories. The Noether currents of these Chern-Weil global symmetries are given by wedge products…
Global symmetries are expected to be violated by gravity, which may cause a serious problem to models based on these symmetries. A famous example is the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem in QCD axion models; it requires a…
The gravitational path integral can compute inner products between different states of open and closed universes. To have a well-defined Hilbert space, these inner products should be positive semi-definite, which is not manifest in the…
The dipole anomaly in the power spectrum of CMB may indicate that the Lorentz boost invarianc is violated at cosmic scale. We assume that the Lorentz symmetry is violated partly from the scale of galaxy. We employ the symmetry of very…
It is widely believed that exact global symmetries do not exist in theories that admit quantum black holes. Here we propose a way to quantify the degree of global symmetry violation in the Hawking radiation of a black hole by using certain…
There are strong reasons to believe that global symmetries of quantum theories cannot be exact in the presence of gravity. While this has been argued at the qualitative level, establishing a quantitative statement is more challenging. In…
We discuss quantum gravitational effects in Einstein theory coupled to periodic axion scalars to analyze the viability of several proposals to achieve superplanckian axion periods (aka decay constants) and their possible application to…
We investigate some consequences of a specific non-conservation of the energy-momentum tensor on the physics of certain cosmic string configurations. This non-conservation is induced by a new gravitational theory recently introduced as an…
Concerning the gravitational corrections to the running of gauge couplings two different results were reported. Some authors claim that gravitational correction at the one-loop level indicates an interesting effect of universal…
All global symmetries are expected to be explicitly broken by quantum gravitational effects, and yet may play an important role in Particle Physics and Cosmology. As such, any evidence for a well-preserved global symmetry would give insight…
Motivated by the apparent dependence of string $\sigma$--models on the sum of spacetime metric and antisymmetric tensor fields, we reconsider gravity theories constructed from a nonsymmetric metric. We first show that all such "geometrical"…