Super-Planckian spatial field variations and quantum gravity

By Daniel Klaewer, Eran Palti. 2016

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A bstractWe study scenarios where a scalar field has a spatially varying vacuum expectation value such that the total field variation is super-Planckian. We focus on the case where the scalar field controls the coupling of a U(1) gauge field, which allows us to apply the Weak Gravity Conjecture to such configurations. We show that this leads to evidence for a conjectured property of quantum gravity that as a scalar field variation in field space asymptotes to infinity there must exist an infinite tower of states whose mass decreases as an exponential function of the scalar field variation. We determine the rate at which the mass of the states reaches this exponential behaviour showing that it occurs quickly after the field variation passes the Planck scale.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7f3754610dac7aeb86de9371165ed80f82ddd3b

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Citations in the corpus

The Swampland Conjectures: A Bridge from Quantum Gravity to Particle Physics (2021, background): “It has also been proposed, that the exponential behaviour cannot be delayed by more than order one distances (in Planck units) and that the Swampland Distance Conjecture should also be satisfied in the presence of a scalar potential (as long as it does not obstruct the infinite distance points) [69,”
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].”
A Tower Weak Gravity Conjecture from Infrared Consistency (2018, background): “ated to other claims which at rst sight appear to be quite dierent. Thus, depending on the considered setup, the WGC can be understood as a statement about black hole decay [1], eld space variations [23,24], CFT states [44,47{ 49], cosmic censorship [25,26], instabilities of AdS vacua [27{30], or, a”
A stringy test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (2018, background): “This principle was dubbed ‘Local Weak Gravity Conjecture’ in [6], which studies in detail the relation between a field dependent version of the WGC and the Swampland Distance Conjecture.”
The weak gravity conjecture and scalar fields (2017, background): “Another conjecture, termed the Refined Swampland Conjecture (RSC) [25, 26], states that once a scalar field varies over a super-Planckian distance ∆φ ≥Mp there is an infinite tower of states, with mass scale m, whose mass decreases exponentially fast as a function of the scalar field variation m (φ+”
The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “n interesting way to probe a gravitational censorship of large eld variations. The relation between the censorship of large spatial eld variations and the Swampland Distance Conjecture was studied in [9], while its relation to the axionic Weak Gravity Conjecture was studied in [155], and more genera”