Pushing the Limits of the Swampland Distance Conjecture

by Dr José Calderón-Infante (CERN)

Tuesday 1 Nov 2022, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

The goal of this talk is to push the limits of the Swampland Distance Conjecture (SDC). This is one of the most relevant conjectures in the Swampland program, whose aim is to identify the criteria that an effective field theory must satisfy in order to be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. For this purpose, we study the SDC in two different contexts: Running solutions and AdS/CFT.

We start by presenting a first example of running solution and its interplay with the SDC. Inspired by this, we propose that consistency of the SDC along the RG flow of the theory imposes constraints on the potentials that are attainable in quantum gravity. By studying this constraints, a new formulation of this conjecture is elucidated: the Convex Hull SDC. We then move to another type of running solutions, the so-called dynamical cobordisms. They receive this name for being the spacetime realization of cobordisms between different theories. We uncover some universal behavior for dynamical cobordisms to nothing, and relate them to the Distance, Cobordism and asymptotic dS conjectures. Finally, we turn our attention to the SDC in the context of AdS/CFT. From the CFT perspective, this conjecture is naturally realized at weak coupling points in which some sector decouples. We then perform some purely CFT analysis in the context of 4d \mathcal{N}=2 theories. This provides the first piece of evidence for the SDC beyond String Theory.

TH-string-seminar-1Nov-nobuildings.pdf