A Tower Weak Gravity Conjecture from Infrared Consistency

By Stefano Andriolo, Daniel Junghans, Toshifumi Noumi, Gary Shiu. 2018

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We analyze infrared consistency conditions of 3D and 4D effective field theories with massive scalars or fermions charged under multiple U(1) gauge fields. At low energies, one can integrate out the massive particles and thus obtain a one‐loop effective action for the gauge fields. In the regime where charge‐independent contributions to higher‐derivative terms in the action are sufficiently small, it is then possible to derive constraints on the charge‐to‐mass ratios of the massive particles from requiring that photons propagate causally and have an analytic S‐matrix. We thus find that the theories need to contain bifundamentals and satisfy a version of the weak gravity conjecture known as the convex‐hull condition. Demanding self‐consistency of the constraints under Kaluza‐Klein compactification, we furthermore show that, for scalars, they imply a stronger version of the weak gravity conjecture in which the charge‐to‐mass ratios of an infinite tower of particles are bounded from below. We find that the tower must again include bifundamentals but does not necessarily have to occupy a charge (sub‐)lattice.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6344ff4ddb4194723d85e5261b9b89d6b2b8900

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Citations in the corpus

The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “In [104] another argument was presented for a necessary tower of particles satisfying the Weak Gravity Conjecture.”
Emergent strings from infinite distance limits (2019, unknown): “For further illustration, we consider a three-fold for which the elliptic fiber is given by the curve in P(2)(1,2,3)[6] defined by the vanishing of W (x, z) = 1 6 x1 6 + 1 3 x2 3 + 1 2 x3 2 − zx1x2x3 .”
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”
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.e., a particle fulfilling Equation (3) or its higher-dimensional generalization (8)) at every point in a (sub)lattice of the lattice of charges, and the Tower Weak Gravity Conjectu”
A stringy test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (2018, background): “General arguments aiming to prove the Weak Gravity Conjecture involve the entropy of black holes [14,47,48], consistency of the effective field theory [9,49] or the AdS/CFT correspondence [50–53].”