Inflation and light Dark Matter constraints from the Swampland

05/09/2022 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Abstract: I will explore the interplay between Swampland conjectures and models of inflation and light Dark Matter. To that end, I will briefly review the weak gravity conjecture (WGC) and the related Festina Lente (FL) bound. These have implications for light darkly and milli-charged particles and can disfavor a large portion of parameter space. The FL bound also implies strong restrictions on the field content of our universe during inflation and presents an opportunity for inflationary model building. At the same time, it rules out some popular models like chromo-natural inflation and gauge-flation. Finally, I will review  another Swampland conjecture related to Stückelberg photon masses and discuss its implications for astro-particle physics.