Evidence for a sublattice weak gravity conjecture

By B. Heidenreich, Michael J. Reece, Tom Rudelius. 2016

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractThe 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 examples a much stronger statement is true: an infinite tower of superextremal particles of different charges exists. We show that effective Kaluza-Klein field theories and perturbative string vacua respect the Sublattice Weak Gravity Conjecture, namely that a finite index sublattice of the full charge lattice exists with a superextremal particle at each site. In perturbative string theory we show that this follows from modular invariance. However, we present counterexamples to the stronger possibility that a superextremal particle exists at every lattice site, including an example in which the lightest charged particle is subextremal. The Sublattice Weak Gravity Conjecture has many implications both for abstract theories of quantum gravity and for real-world physics. For instance, it implies that if a gauge group with very small coupling e exists, then the fundamental gravitational cutoff energy of the theory is no higher than ∼ e1/3MPl.

Subfields: Mathematical Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45c1fddf717159e84ffc377105b36b545e6d9a12

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Mathematical Physics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Lectures on the Swampland Program in String Compactifications (2021, methodology): “Non-susy AdS/CFT: An instability in AdS, even if highly suppressed, has dramatic implications for the boundary CFT. Note that an observer at the boundary has access to an infinite volume of the bulk and hence can detect any bulk instability instantaneously.”
The Swampland Conjectures: A Bridge from Quantum Gravity to Particle Physics (2021, background): “These are the (Sub)lattice Weak Gravity Conjecture [30, 35], which requires the existence of a superextremal particle (i.”
A stringy test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (2018, background): “The physics behind this seeming coincidence, is, of course, analogous to the behaviour observed already for the heterotic string on flat backgrounds in [1,4]: It reflects the fact that the highly excited string states can asymptotically become extremal black holes themselves [66].”
Emergent strings from infinite distance limits (2019, unknown): “This conjecture has recently been confirmed quantitatively and further discussed in various different classes of string compactifications [2–20].”