Seminar May 20: M. Scalisi

On May 20 we will have a seminar by

Marco Scalisi (MPI München)

Title: The Gravitino and the Swampland

Abstract: We propose a new swampland conjecture stating that the limit of vanishing gravitino mass corresponds to the massless limit of an infinite tower of states and to the consequent breakdown of the effective field theory. We test our proposal in large classes of models coming from compactification of string theory to four dimensions, where we identify the Kaluza-Klein nature of the tower of states becoming light. We point out a general relation between the gravitino mass and abelian gauge coupling in models with extended supersymmetry, which can survive also in examples with minimal supersymmetry. This allows us to connect our conjecture to other well established swampland conjectures, such as the weak gravity conjecture or the absence of global symmetries in quantum gravity. We discuss phenomenological implications of our conjecture in (quasi-)de Sitter backgrounds and extract a lower bound for the gravitino mass in terms of the Hubble parameter.

Meeting information:
20th of May 14:30 Italian Time
Zoom Meeting https://l.infn.it/stringwebseminar

Seminar January 28: L. Rastelli

On January 28 we will have a seminar by

Leonardo Rastelli (Stony Brook University)

Title: A CFT distance conjecture

Abstract:
We formulate a series of conjectures relating the geometry of conformal manifolds to the spectrum of local operators in conformal field theories in d > 2 spacetime dimensions. Our central conjecture is that all theories at infinite distance in the Zamolodchikov metric possess an emergent higher-spin symmetry, generated by an infinite tower of currents whose anomalous dimensions vanish exponentially in the distance. In the holographic context our conjectures are related to the Distance Conjecture in the swampland program. We motivate and illustrate these conjectures by surveying the landscape of superconformal field theories in three and four dimensions.

Meeting information:
14th of January at 14:30 Italian Time
Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/19843543

You can watch the recording at
https://pandora.infn.it/public/32a276