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(25.05.) Distance Conjectures: from CFTs to Bottom-up to the Species Scale
Jose Calderon-Infante (CERN)
25.05.2023 at 16:15
In this talk, I will report on various developments concerning distance conjectures in the Swampland program. The first part will be devoted to the Swampland Distance Conjecture in AdS/CFT. In this context, the first part of the so-called CFT Distance Conjecture posits that all points in which there is a higher-spin symmetry enhancement are at infinite distance in the conformal manifold. I will briefly discuss how to prove this statement only using methods from the conformal toolkit, and without making any extra assumptions like, for instance, the presence of supersymmetry. For the second part, I will turn to a more bottom-up perspective. For this, we consider a generic effective field theory with massless scalars. Applying the Covariant Entropy Bound to it in a background of the Dynamical Cobordism type, I will show how to recover all the features of the Swampland Distance Conjecture purely from the bottom-up. In addition, this argument will naturally lead to a sharpened version of the conjecture in which the species scale plays a central role, the Species Scale Distance Conjecture (SSDC). The third part will be devoted to it. After presenting a convex hull formulation, I will discuss how the SSDC behaves under dimensional reduction and verify it in M-theory toroidal compactifications.
Arnold Sommerfeld Center
Theresienstrasse 37
Room 348
via ZOOM