Eran Palti 'The Weak Gravity Conjecture and Scalar Fields'

Tuesday 6 Jun 2017, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

We will discuss two conjectures regarding properties that effective theories must posses in order to be compatible with a possible ultraviolet completion which includes quantum gravity. The first is the Weak Gravity Conjecture, which bounds the mass of particles in the theory relative to their charge. The second is the Refined Swampland Conjecture, which describes universal behaviour that emerges when a scalar field develops an expectation value larger than the Planck mass. We will generalise the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields, present evidence for the conjectures, and argue that these two seemingly disparate conjectures are actually deeply related.

WGC-Cern.pdf