Pair Production and Gravity as the Weakest Force

Abstract

The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) is usually formulated in terms of the stability of extremal black-holes or in terms of long distance Coulomb/Newton potentials. However one can think of other physical processes to compare the relative strength of gravity versus other forces. We argue for an alternative formulation in terms of particle pair production at threshold or, equivalently, pair annihilation at rest. Imposing that the production rate by any force mediator (photon or scalar) of pairs of charged particles be larger or equal to graviton production, we recover known conditions for the $U(1)$ WGC and its extensions. Unlike other formulations though, threshold pair production is sensitive to short range couplings present in scalar interactions and gives rise to a Scalar WGC. Application to moduli scalars gives rise to specific conditions on the trilinear and quartic couplings which involve first and second derivatives of the WGC particle mass with respect to the moduli. Some extremal solutions to these equations correspond to massive states behaving like BPS, KK and winding states which feature duality invariance and are in agreement with the Swampland distance conjecture. Conditions for $N=2$ BPS states saturate our bounds and we discuss specific examples of BPS states which become massless at large Kahler moduli in Type IIA N=2, D=4 CY and orbifold compactifications. We study possible implications for potentials depending on moduli only through WGC massive states. For some simple classes of potentials one recovers constraints somewhat similar but not equivalent to a Swampland dS conjecture.

arXiv commentDiagrammatic derivation of the Strong Scalar PPWGC included in section 5. Minor corrections

References in corpus (41)

• The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as the Weakest Force
• On the Geometry of the String Landscape and the Swampland
• The Swampland: Introduction and Review
• Distance and de Sitter Conjectures on the Swampland
• The String Landscape and the Swampland
• De Sitter Space and the Swampland
• Bounds on Slow Roll and the de Sitter Swampland
• Type IIA Moduli Stabilization
• Infinite Distances in Field Space and Massless Towers of States
• AdS and the Swampland
• Duality Transformations in Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories coupled to Supergravity,
• Trans-Planckian Censorship and the Swampland
• Fluxes, moduli fixing and MSSM-like vacua in a simple IIA orientifold
• Tensionless Strings and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Naturalness and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• The Weak Gravity Conjecture and Scalar Fields
• Evidence for a Lattice Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Perturbative Quantum Gravity and its Relation to Gauge Theory
• Sharpening the Weak Gravity Conjecture with Dimensional Reduction
• More Dual Fluxes and Moduli Fixing
• A Stringy Test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture
• A Tower Weak Gravity Conjecture from Infrared Consistency
• The Swampland Distance Conjecture for Kahler moduli
• Graviton Physics
• The web of swampland conjectures and the TCC bound
• Repulsive Forces and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Modular Fluxes, Elliptic Genera, and Weak Gravity Conjectures in Four Dimensions
• The Swampland Distance Conjecture and Towers of Tensionless Branes
• Scalar Fields, Hierarchical UV/IR Mixing and The Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Modular Symmetries and the Swampland Conjectures
• Gauge and Gravity Amplitude Relations
• Quantum Log-Corrections to Swampland Conjectures
• A Strong Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture and Some Implications
• Discrete Symmetries, Weak Coupling Conjecture and Scale Separation in AdS Vacua
• Attractors in Black
• On scale separation in type II AdS flux vacua
• Revisiting the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture
• A Conjecture on the Minimal Size of Bound States
• Factorization in Graviton Scattering and the "Natural" Value of the g-factor
• Factorization of gravitational Compton scattering amplitude in the linearized version of general relativity
• Factorization in graviton interactions

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Lectures on the Swampland Program in String Compactifications
• The Convex Hull Swampland Distance Conjecture and Bounds on Non-geodesics
• Type IIB flux compactifications with $h^{1,1}=0$
• Dilatonic (Anti-)de Sitter Black Holes and Weak Gravity Conjecture
• String-Inspired Running Vacuum, the "Vacuumon", and the Swampland Criteria
• Newton versus Coulomb for Kaluza-Klein modes
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Swampland: The Cosmologist's Handbook to the string-theoretical Swampland Programme
• Gravitational Positivity Bounds on Scalar Potentials
• Stability of BPS States and Weak Coupling Limits
• Dynamical Tadpoles and Weak Gravity Constraints