Trans-Planckian Censorship and the Swampland

By Alek Bedroya, C. Vafa. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2019

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we propose a new Swampland condition, the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC), based on the idea that in a consistent quantum theory of gravity sub-Planckian quantum fluctuations should remain quantum and never become larger than the Hubble horizon and freeze in an expanding universe. Applied to the case of scalar fields, it leads to conditions that are similar to the refined dS Swampland conjecture. For large field ranges, TCC is stronger than the dS Swampland conjecture but it is weaker for small field ranges. In particular for asymptotic regions of field space, TCC leads to a bound V′≥2d−1d−2V,\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$ \left|V^{\prime}\right|\ge \frac{2}{\sqrt{\left(d-1\right)\left(d-2\right)}}V, $$\end{document} which is consistent with all known cases in string theory. Like the dS Swampland conjecture, the TCC forbids long-lived meta-stable dS spaces, but it does allow sufficiently short-lived ones.

Subfields: Applied Mathematics, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b3a6ac55181ed3aff612e02230eeb03710f24afd

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Citations in the corpus

Lectures on the Swampland Program in String Compactifications (2021, background): “Let us finally mention that there is another conjecture also constraining the scalar potential in de Sitter space; this is the Transplanckian Censorship conjecture (TCC) [52].”
Assessing observational constraints on dark energy (2024, neutral): “We note that for each model considered in this work, the Swampland conjectures [18, 21, 22] (thought to be required for a consistent theory of quantum gravity) are satisfied for a substantial range of parameters.”
The Swampland Conjectures: A Bridge from Quantum Gravity to Particle Physics (2021, background): “First of all, it is assumed that the 4d vacuum we live in is a (meta)stable dS vacuum, not a runaway (note that this is allowed by the Trans-Planckian Censorship Censorship Conjecture [101] but not with the (refined) dS Conjecture [5–8] ).”
Islands outside the horizon (2019, background): “It has been recently conjectured in [40] (see also e.”
Trans-Planckian censorship and inflationary cosmology (2019, background): “In [11], the relationship between the TCC and other swampland conjectures [12] which have recently attracted a lot of attention (see e.”