相关论文: Fermions and the Swampland
This article aims at drawing the attention of astronomers on the ability of future cosmological surveys to put constraints on string theory. The fact that "quantum gravity" might be constrained by large scale astrophysical observations is a…
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 this talk, I present a new framework to understand the long-standing fermion mass hierarchy puzzle. We extend the Standard Model gauge symmetry by an extra local U(1)_S symmetry, broken spontaneously at the electroweak scale. All the SM…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…
A scheme is proposed to construct integer and fractional topological quantum states of fermions in two spatial dimensions. We devise models for such states by coupling wires of non-chiral Luttinger liquids of electrons, that are arranged in…
This paper studies false vacuum lumps surrounded by the true vacuum in a real scalar field potential in flat spacetime. Fermions reside in the core of the lump, which are coupled with the scalar field via Yukawa interaction. Such lumps are…
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…
For certain terms in the action, supersymmetry can forbid an infinite number of possible contributions. We study whether such protection can occur in quantum gravity even without sufficient supersymmetry. We focus on whether 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…
We discuss the cosmological implications of the string swampland conjectures for late-time cosmology, and test them against a wide range of state of the art cosmological observations. The refined de Sitter conjecture constrains either the…
We study models of fermion mass matrices based on a flavor- and generation-dependent string-motivated U(1)$_A$ gauge symmetry and report two new classes of solutions to the requisite consistency conditions. In particular, we propose that…
One of the most challenging hurdles to the construction of realistic composite Higgs models is the generation of Yukawa couplings for the Standard Model fermions. This problem can be successfully addressed in approximate conformal theories…
Among the firm predictions of softly broken supersymmetry is the identity of gauge couplings and the corresponding Yukawa couplings between gauginos, sfermions and fermions. In the event that a SUSY-like spectrum of new particles is…
We consider fermion-gauge couplings in the Wilson-Yukawa approach for lattice chiral gauge theories. At the leading order of a fermionic hopping parameter expansion we find that the fermion-gauge coupling has a chiral and tree-like…
In pure N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills with gauge group SU(N), the domain walls which separate the N vacua have been argued, on the basis of string theory realizations, to be D-branes for the confining string. In a certain limit, this means…
Swampland conjecture has been recently proposed to connect early time cosmological models with the string landscape, and then to understand if related scalar fields and potentials can come from some fundamental theory in the high energy…
We propose a class of theories to generate quark and lepton mass matrices where the scale of new physics is at the TeV scale, without inducing the large flavor and CP violating processes that are often thought to relegate the origin of…
By combining swampland conjectures with observational data, it was recently suggested that the cosmological hierarchy problem (i.e. the smallness of the dark energy in Planck units) could be understood as an asymptotic limit in field space,…
We study the effects of extra spacetime dimensions at intermediate mass scales, as expected in string theories with large-radius compactifications, and focus on the gauge and Yukawa couplings within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard…
Scalar field models with non-standard kinetic terms have been proposed in the context of k-inflation, of Born-Infeld lagrangians, of phantom energy and, more in general, of low-energy string theory. In general, scalar fields are expected to…