It is known that quantum gravitational effects due to virtual black holes and wormholes can exert an important influence by violating global symmetries. These processes have recently been investigated by Kallosh et al., who found, for the heterotic superstring theory, that there is a sufficient suppression of deleterious effects via the Euclidean action S E from the presence of higher-derivative terms occurring as a topological invariant, the Euler characteristic χ, regardless of the precise details of the underlying wormhole solution. Here, we consider this result further, arguing, in the absence of inflation, that there are no large wormholes in the heterotic superstring theory for which the wormhole action per se is large enough, topological suppression being the only possibility. The model-independent superstring axion may be susceptible to these corrections, because, as shown by Witten, it possesses a non-linearly realized, global U(1) symmetry, being a real scalar field coupled to the anomalous term [Formula: see text] from the outset, and they are relevant to the R-parity symmetry. Allowing for the unknown effect of the black holes, however, we conjecture that these quantum gravitational effects produce no observable consequences.
∞-∞: Vacuum energy and virtual black holes
