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Register a new userTowards a Swampland Global Symmetry Conjecture using Weak Gravity
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It is widely believed and in part established that exact global symmetries are inconsistent with quantum gravity. One then expects that approximate global symmetries can be quantitatively constrained by quantum gravity or swampland arguments. We provide such a bound for an important class of global symmetries: Those arising from a gauged $U(1)$ with the vector made massive via Higgsing with an axion. The latter necessarily couples to instantons, and their action can be constrained, using both the electric and magnetic version of the axionic weak gravity conjecture, in terms of the cutoff of the theory. As a result, instanton-induced symmetry breaking operators with a suppression factor not smaller than $exp(-M_{rm P}^2/Lambda^2)$ are present, where $Lambda$ is a cutoff of the 4d effective theory. We provide a general argument and clarify the meaning of $Lambda$. Simple 4d and 5d models are presented to illustrate this, and we recall that this is the standard way in which things work out in string compactifications with brane instantons. The relation of our constraint to bounds that can be derived from wormholes or gravitational instantons and to those motivated by black-hole effects at finite temperature are discussed, and we present a generalization of the Giddings-Strominger wormhole solution to the case of a gauge-derived $U(1)$ global symmetry. Finally, we discuss potential loopholes to our arguments.
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The mild form of the Weak Gravity Conjecture states that quantum or higher-derivative corrections should decrease the mass of large extremal charged black holes at fixed charge. This allows extremal black holes to decay, unless protected by a symmetry (such as supersymmetry). We reformulate this conjecture as an integrated condition on the effective stress tensor capturing the effect of quantum or higher-derivative corrections. In addition to charged black holes, we also consider rotating BTZ black holes and show that this condition is satisfied as a consequence of the $c$-theorem, proving a spinning version of the Weak Gravity Conjecture. We also apply our results to a five-dimensional boosted black string with higher-derivative corrections. The boosted black string has a $text{BTZ}times S^2$ near-horizon geometry and, after Kaluza-Klein reduction, describes a four-dimensional charged black hole. Combining the spinning and charged Weak Gravity Conjecture we obtain positivity bounds on the five-dimensional Wilson coefficients that are stronger than those obtained from charged black holes alone.
Strong (sublattice or tower) formulations of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) imply that, if a weakly coupled gauge theory exists, a tower of charged particles drives the theory to strong coupling at an ultraviolet scale well below the Planck scale. This tower can consist of low-spin states, as in Kaluza-Klein theory, or high-spin states, as with weakly-coupled strings. We provide a suggestive bottom-up argument based on the mild $p$-form WGC that, for any gauge theory coupled to a fundamental axion through a $theta F wedge F$ term, the tower is a stringy one. The charge-carrying string states at or below the WGC scale $g M_mathrm{Pl}$ are simply axion strings for $theta$, with charged modes arising from anomaly inflow. Kaluza-Klein theories evade this conclusion and postpone the appearance of high-spin states to higher energies because they lack a $theta F wedge F$ term. For abelian Kaluza-Klein theories, modified arguments based on additional abelian groups that interact with the Kaluza-Klein gauge group sometimes pinpoint a mass scale for charged strings. These arguments reinforce the Emergent String and Distant Axionic String Conjectures. We emphasize the unproven assumptions and weak points of the arguments, which provide interesting targets for further work. In particular, a sharp characterization of when gauge fields admit $theta F wedge F$ couplings and when they do not would be immensely useful for particle phenomenology and for clarifying the implications of the Weak Gravity Conjecture.
I conjecture an upper bound on the number of possible swampland conjectures by comparing the entropy required by the conjectures themselves to the Beckenstein-Hawking entropy of the cosmological horizon. Assuming of order 100 kilobits of entropy per conjecture, this places an upper bound of order $10^{117}$ on the number of conjectures. I estimate the rate of production of swampland conjectures by the number of papers listed on INSPIRE with the word swampland in the title or abstract, which has been showing approximately exponential growth since 2014. At the current rate of growth, the entropy bound on the number of swampland conjectures can be projected to be saturated on a timescale of order $10^{-8} H_0^{-1}$. I compare the upper bound from the Swampland Conjecture Bound Conjecture (SCBC) to the estimated number of vacua in the string landscape. Employing the duality suggested by AdS/CFT between the quantum complexity of a holographic state and the volume of a Wheeler-Dewitt spacetime patch, I place a conservative lower bound of order $mathcal{N}_H > 10^{263}$ on the number of Hubble volumes in the multiverse which must be driven to heat death to fully explore the string landscape via conjectural methods.
We argue a smallness of gauge couplings in abelian quiver gauge theories, taking the anomaly cancellation condition into account. In theories of our interest there exist chiral fermions leading to chiral gauge anomalies, and an anomaly-free gauge coupling tends to be small, and hence can give a non-trivial condition of the weak gravity conjecture. As concrete examples, we consider $U(1)^{k}$ gauge theories with a discrete symmetry associated with cyclic permutations between the gauge groups, and identify anomaly-free $U(1)$ gauge symmetries and the corresponding gauge couplings. Owing to this discrete symmetry, we can systematically study the models and we find that the models would be examples of the weak coupling conjecture. It is conjectured that a certain class of chiral gauge theories with too many $U(1)$ symmetries may be in the swampland. We also numerically study constraints on the couplings from the scalar weak gravity conjecture in a concrete model. These constraints may have a phenomenological implication to model building of a chiral hidden sector as well as the visible sector.
The requirement for an ultraviolet completable theory to be well-behaved upon compactification has been suggested as a guiding principle for distinguishing the landscape from the swampland. Motivated by the weak gravity conjecture and the multiple point principle, we investigate the vacuum structure of the standard model compactified on $S^1$ and $T^2$. The measured value of the Higgs mass implies, in addition to the electroweak vacuum, the existence of a new vacuum where the Higgs field value is around the Planck scale. We explore two- and three-dimensional critical points of the moduli potential arising from compactifications of the electroweak vacuum as well as this high scale vacuum, in the presence of Majorana/Dirac neutrinos and/or axions. We point out potential sources of instability for these lower dimensional critical points in the standard model landscape. We also point out that a high scale $AdS_4$ vacuum of the Standard Model, if exists, would be at odd with the conjecture that all non-supersymmetric $AdS$ vacua are unstable. We argue that, if we require a degeneracy between three- and four-dimensional vacua as suggested by the multiple point principle, the neutrinos are predicted to be Dirac, with the mass of the lightest neutrino O(1-10) meV, which may be tested by future CMB, large scale structure and $21$cm line observations.
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