Shedding black hole light on the emergent string conjecture

Abstract

Asymptotically massless towers of species are ubiquitous in the string landscape when infinite-distance limits are approached. Due to the remarkable properties of string dualities, they always comprise Kaluza-Klein states or higher-spin excitations of weakly coupled, asymptotically tensionless critical strings. The connection between towers of light species and small black holes warrants seeking a bottom-up rationale for this dichotomoy, dubbed emergent string conjecture. In this paper we move a first step in this direction, exploring bottom-up constraints on towers of light species motivated purely from the consistency of the corresponding thermodynamic picture for small black holes. These constraints shed light on the allowed towers in quantum gravity, and, upon combining them with unitarity and causality constraints from perturbative graviton scattering, they provide evidence for the emergent string scenario with no reference to a specific ultraviolet completion.

45 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, v2: journal version

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• On the Origin of Species Thermodynamics and the Black Hole - Tower Correspondence
• Species scale, worldsheet CFTs and emergent geometry
• Bulk Black Hole Dark Matter
• Emergent Strings in Type IIB Calabi--Yau Compactifications
• Asymptotic safety, quantum gravity, and the swampland: a conceptual assessment
• Lectures in Quantum Gravity
• EFT & Species Scale: Friends or foes?
• Black Hole Entropy, Quantum Corrections and EFT Transitions
• Matching the Vilkovisky-DeWitt Effective Action of Quantum Gravity to String Theory
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Swampland: The Cosmologist's Handbook to the string-theoretical Swampland Programme
• Background instability of quintessence model in light of entropy and distance conjecture
• Higher-Spin and Higher-Point Constraints on Stringy Amplitudes