Sharpening the weak gravity conjecture with dimensional reduction

By B. Heidenreich, Michael J. Reece, Tom Rudelius. 2015

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractWe investigate the behavior of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) under toroidal compactification and RG flows, finding evidence that WGC bounds for single photons become weaker in the infrared. By contrast, we find that a photon satisfying the WGC will not necessarily satisfy it after toroidal compactification when black holes charged under the Kaluza-Klein photons are considered. Doing so either requires an infinite number of states of different charges to satisfy the WGC in the original theory or a restriction on allowed compactification radii. These subtleties suggest that if the Weak Gravity Conjecture is true, we must seek a stronger form of the conjecture that is robust under compactification. We propose a “Lattice Weak Gravity Conjecture” that meets this requirement: a superextremal particle should exist for every charge in the charge lattice. The perturbative heterotic string satisfies this conjecture. We also use compactification to explore the extent to which the WGC applies to axions. We argue that gravitational instanton solutions in theories of axions coupled to dilaton-like fields are analogous to extremal black holes, motivating a WGC for axions. This is further supported by a match between the instanton action and that of wrapped black branes in a higher-dimensional UV completion.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7155a4ccd00151a40b1ef847378ab4106368bd49

How researchers see this paper

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

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Eran Palti
2. Gary Shiu
3. Pablo Soler
4. M. Graña
5. Tom Rudelius
6. M. Montero
7. T. Weigand
8. Michael J. Reece

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Eran Palti
2. Gary Shiu
3. T. Weigand
4. Tom Rudelius
5. M. Graña
6. Pablo Soler
7. C. Vafa
8. Michael J. Reece

Citations in the corpus

• Euclidean Wormholes, Baby Universes, and Their Impact on Particle Physics and Cosmology (2018, background): “The potentially strong constraints on large-field inflation arising from the weak gravity conjecture are being intensely studied, and are one of the main reasons for the current interest in wormhole physics [76,93,95].”
• A stringy test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (2018, methodology): “This scalar profile modifies the charge-to-mass ratio of an extremal charged black hole, and it is this modified value that constitutes the lower bound for the chargeto-mass ratio of a particle satisfying the WGC [3].”
• The Weak Gravity Conjecture in three dimensions (2016, background): “Thus, the spectral flow argument only supports a Sublattice WGC instead of the full Lattice WGC introduced in [13].”
• The weak gravity conjecture and scalar fields (2017, background): “Certainly one possibility is to require that a WGC state exists for every charge choice, which is the Lattice WGC [11,17].”
• A Tower Weak Gravity Conjecture from Infrared Consistency (2018, methodology): “ns a ball of radius O(1). An even stronger version of the WGC|the so-called lattice WGC|can be motivated if one additionally demands that the WGC is self-consistent under Kaluza-Klein compactication [43]. Requiring consistency under dimensional reduction suggests that a bound on the charge-to-mass v”
• Backreacted axion field ranges in string theory (2016, unknown): “The complex-structure moduli Kahler potential is the mirror of the P[1,1,1,6,9] CY studied in [61].”
• Lectures on the Swampland Program in String Compactifications (2021, background): “At the moment the available strong versions that are consistent with everything we know and any string theory example are the Sublattice WGC [26, 27, 33] or the Tower WGC [24], which require the states satisfying the WGC to form a (full dimensional) sublattice of the charge lattice or a tower, respe”
• Evidence for a sublattice weak gravity conjecture (2016, methodology): “As explained in [11], black hole solutions of this type can be obtained by boosting a black hole with no graviphoton charge along the torus.”
• Non-supersymmetric AdS and the Swampland (2016, methodology): “Remarkably, it was shown in [31] that, if compactification preserves supersymmetry, the value of α is modified exactly in such a way to compensate for the d dependence in (d−3)/(d−2) and to make the WGC inequality (2.”
• The Swampland Conjectures: A Bridge from Quantum Gravity to Particle Physics (2021, background): “In particular, the requirement that extremal black holes should be able to decay can be generalized to black brane solutions, as done in [30], where a generalization of the Weak Gravity Conjecture for p-branes in d-dimensions was proposed by requiring the existence of branes fulfilling”
• The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “This is the setup studied in [7].”
• Weak gravity strongly constrains large-field axion inflation (2015, methodology): “(We note in passing that the EWGC is implied by the much-stronger “lattice WGC” [56]— discussed briefly in section 4.”