scholarly journals The UV fate of anomalous U(1)s and the Swampland

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Craig ◽  
Isabel Garcia Garcia ◽  
Graham D. Kribs

Abstract Massive U(1) gauge theories featuring parametrically light vectors are suspected to belong in the Swampland of consistent EFTs that cannot be embedded into a theory of quantum gravity. We study four-dimensional, chiral U(1) gauge theories that appear anomalous over a range of energies up to the scale of anomaly-cancelling massive chiral fermions. We show that such theories must be UV-completed at a finite cutoff below which a radial mode must appear, and cannot be decoupled — a Stückelberg limit does not exist. When the infrared fermion spectrum contains a mixed U(1)-gravitational anomaly, this class of theories provides a toy model of a boundary into the Swampland, for sufficiently small values of the vector mass. In this context, we show that the limit of a parametrically light vector comes at the cost of a quantum gravity scale that lies parametrically below MP1, and our result provides field theoretic evidence for the existence of a Swampland of EFTs that is disconnected from the subset of theories compatible with a gravitational UV-completion. Moreover, when the low energy theory also contains a U(1)3 anomaly, the Weak Gravity Conjecture scale makes an appearance in the form of a quantum gravity cutoff for values of the gauge coupling above a certain critical size.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandramouli Chowdhury ◽  
Olga Papadoulaki ◽  
Suvrat Raju

We consider a set of observers who live near the boundary of global AdS, and are allowed to act only with simple low-energy unitaries and make measurements in a small interval of time. The observers are not allowed to leave the near-boundary region. We describe a physical protocol that nevertheless allows these observers to obtain detailed information about the bulk state. This protocol utilizes the leading gravitational back-reaction of a bulk excitation on the metric, and also relies on the entanglement-structure of the vacuum. For low-energy states, we show how the near-boundary observers can use this protocol to completely identify the bulk state. We explain why the protocol fails completely in theories without gravity, including non-gravitational gauge theories. This provides perturbative evidence for the claim that one of the signatures of holography - the fact that information about the bulk is also available near the boundary - is already visible in the low-energy theory of gravity.


1996 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1929-1973 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. KLEMM ◽  
W. LERCHE ◽  
S. THEISEN

We elaborate on our previous work on (N=2)-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. In particular, we show how to explicitly determine the low energy quantum effective action for G=SU(3) from the underlying hyperelliptic Riemann surface, and calculate the leading instanton corrections. This is done by solving Picard-Fuchs equations and asymptotically evaluating period integrals. We find that the dynamics of the SU(3) theory is governed by an Appell system of type F4, and compute the exact quantum gauge coupling explicitly in terms of Appell functions.


1997 ◽  
Vol 12 (27) ◽  
pp. 4907-4931 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Antoniadis ◽  
B. Pioline

Low-energy limits of N = 2 supersymmetric field theories in the Higgs branch are described in terms of a nonlinear four-dimensional σ-model on a hyper-Kähler target space, classically obtained as a hyper-Kähler quotient of the original flat hypermultiplet space by the gauge group. We review in a pedagogical way this construction, and illustrate it in various examples, with special attention given to the singularities emerging in the low-energy theory. In particular, we thoroughly study the Higgs branch singularity of Seiberg–Witten SU(2) theory with Nf flavors, interpreted by Witten as a small instanton singularity in the moduli space of one instanton on ℝ4. By explicitly evaluating the metric, we show that this Higgs branch coincides with the Higgs branch of a U(1) N = 2 SUSY theory with the number of flavors predicted by the singularity structure of Seiberg–Witten's theory in the Coulomb phase. We find another example of Higgs phase duality, namely between the Higgs phases of U(Nc)Nf flavors and U(Nf-Nc)Nf flavors theories, by using a geometric interpretation due to Biquard et al. This duality may be relevant for understanding Seiberg's conjectured duality Nc ↔ Nf-Nc in N = 1 SUSY SU(Nc) gauge theories.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Prarit Agarwal ◽  
Jaewon Song

Abstract We find large N gauge theories containing a large number of operators within a band of low conformal dimensions. One of such examples is the four-dimensional $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 1 supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theory with one adjoint and a pair of fundamental/anti-fundamental chiral multiplets. This theory flows to a superconformal theory in the infrared upon a superpotential coupling with gauge singlets. The gap in the low-lying spectrum scales as 1/N and the central charges scale as O(N1) contrary to the usual O(N2) scaling of ordinary gauge theory coming from the matrix degree of freedom. We find the AdS version of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) holds for this theory, although it cannot be holographically dual to supergravity. This supports the validity of WGC in a more general theory of quantum gravity.


2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (13n14) ◽  
pp. 2447-2451
Author(s):  
DAVID J. TOMS

Robinson and Wilczek have suggested that loop corrections in quantum gravity can alter the running gauge coupling constants from the behaviour found in the absence of gravity. Although their original calculation is not correct, the basic idea behind their paper has been re-examined recently for quantized Einstein–Maxwell theory with a cosmological constant. In this essay I discuss some of the issues surrounding the calculation and mention some of the implications. I argue that it is possible for a theory that is not conventionally asymptotically free to become so in the presence of gravity, and for gravity to lead to a new ultraviolet fixed point. This establishes a provocative link between the microscopic and macroscopic realms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulio Bonelli ◽  
Francesco Fucito ◽  
Jose Francisco Morales ◽  
Massimiliano Ronzani ◽  
Ekaterina Sysoeva ◽  
...  

AbstractWe compute the $$\mathcal{N}=2$$ N = 2 supersymmetric partition function of a gauge theory on a four-dimensional compact toric manifold via equivariant localization. The result is given by a piecewise constant function of the Kähler form with jumps along the walls where the gauge symmetry gets enhanced. The partition function on such manifolds is written as a sum over the residues of a product of partition functions on $$\mathbb {C}^2$$ C 2 . The evaluation of these residues is greatly simplified by using an “abstruse duality” that relates the residues at the poles of the one-loop and instanton parts of the $$\mathbb {C}^2$$ C 2 partition function. As particular cases, our formulae compute the SU(2) and SU(3) equivariant Donaldson invariants of $$\mathbb {P}^2$$ P 2 and $$\mathbb {F}_n$$ F n and in the non-equivariant limit reproduce the results obtained via wall-crossing and blow up methods in the SU(2) case. Finally, we show that the U(1) self-dual connections induce an anomalous dependence on the gauge coupling, which turns out to satisfy a $$\mathcal {N}=2$$ N = 2 analog of the $$\mathcal {N}=4$$ N = 4 holomorphic anomaly equations.


Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Mariana Graña ◽  
Alvaro Herráez

The swampland is the set of seemingly consistent low-energy effective field theories that cannot be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. In this review we cover some of the conjectural properties that effective theories should possess in order not to fall in the swampland, and we give an overview of their main applications to particle physics. The latter include predictions on neutrino masses, bounds on the cosmological constant, the electroweak and QCD scales, the photon mass, the Higgs potential and some insights about supersymmetry.


2017 ◽  
Vol 607 ◽  
pp. A121 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. G. Bernardini ◽  
G. Ghirlanda ◽  
S. Campana ◽  
P. D’Avanzo ◽  
J.-L. Atteia ◽  
...  

The delay in arrival times between high and low energy photons from cosmic sources can be used to test the violation of the Lorentz invariance (LIV), predicted by some quantum gravity theories, and to constrain its characteristic energy scale EQG that is of the order of the Planck energy. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and blazars are ideal for this purpose thanks to their broad spectral energy distribution and cosmological distances: at first order approximation, the constraints on EQG are proportional to the photon energy separation and the distance of the source. However, the LIV tiny contribution to the total time delay can be dominated by intrinsic delays related to the physics of the sources: long GRBs typically show a delay between high and low energy photons related to their spectral evolution (spectral lag). Short GRBs have null intrinsic spectral lags and are therefore an ideal tool to measure any LIV effect. We considered a sample of 15 short GRBs with known redshift observed by Swift and we estimate a limit on EQG ≳ 1.5 × 1016 GeV. Our estimate represents an improvement with respect to the limit obtained with a larger (double) sample of long GRBs and is more robust than the estimates on single events because it accounts for the intrinsic delay in a statistical sense.


2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (04) ◽  
pp. 283-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
JITESH R. BHATT ◽  
SUDHANWA PATRA ◽  
UTPAL SARKAR

The gravitational corrections to the gauge coupling constants of Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories have been shown to diverge quadratically. Since this result will have interesting consequences, this has been analyzed by several authors from different approaches. We propose to discuss this issue from a phenomenological approach. We analyze the SU(5) gauge coupling unification and argue that the gravitational corrections to gauge coupling constants may not vanish when higher dimensional non-renormalizable terms are included in the problem.


2001 ◽  
Vol 16 (04n06) ◽  
pp. 349-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. M. SHEIKH-JABBARI

The recently found noncritical open string theories is reviewed. These open strings, noncommutative open string theories (NCOS), arise as consistent quantum theories describing the low energy theory of D-branes in a background electric B-field in the critical limit. Focusing on the D3-brane case, we construct the most general (3+1) NCOS, which is described by four parameters. We study S- and T-dualities of these theories and argue the existence of a U-duality group.


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