During the 2022-23 academic year, the CMSA will host a seminar on Swampland, organized by Max Wiesner and Cumrun Vafa. This seminar will take place biweekly on Mondays at 11:00 am – 12:00 pm (Boston time).
The meetings will take place in Room G10 at the CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge MA 02138 and virtually via Zoom.
To learn how to attend, please subscribe here.
Talks will be posted on the Swampland Seminars YouTube channel. The schedule will be updated as talks are confirmed.
Abstract: In this talk I will review massive type IIA flux compactifications that seem to give rise to infinite families of supersymmetric 4d AdS vacua. These vacua provide an interesting testing ground for the swampland program. After reviewing potential shortcomings of this setup, I will discuss recent progress on overcoming them and getting a better understanding of these […]
Abstract: Extremal black holes play a key role in our understanding of various swampland conjectures and in particular the WGC. The mild form of the WGC states that higher-derivative corrections should decrease the mass of extremal black holes at fixed charge. Whether or not this conjecture is satisfied depends on the sign of the combination […]
Abstract: The theory of topological modular forms leads to many interesting constraints and predictions for two-dimensional quantum field theories, and some of them might have interesting implications for the swampland program. In this talk, I will show that a conjecture by Segal, Stolz and Teichner requires the constant term of the partition function of a bosonic holomorphic […]
Speakers: Fernando Marchesano (UAM-CSIC, Madrid) and Max Wiesner (Harvard CMSA) Title: 4d strings at strong coupling As usual, the format will be 45 min talk + 30 min discussion, to encourage participation from the audience. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Open Mic Discussion Topic: Entropy bounds (species bound, Bekenstein bound, CKN bound, and the like)
Abstract: A proposal to use the renormalisation group to address moduli stabilisation in IIB string perturbation theory will be described. We revisit brane-antibrane inflation combining this proposal with non-linearly realised supersymmetry.
Swampland Seminar Speakers: Simon Caron-Huot (McGill University) and Julio Parra (Caltech) Title: Causality constraints on corrections to Einstein gravity Abstract: We study constraints from causality and unitarity on 2→2 graviton scattering in four-dimensional weakly-coupled effective field theories. Together, causality and unitarity imply dispersion relations that connect low-energy observables to high-energy data. Using such dispersion relations, we derive two-sided bounds on gravitational Wilson coefficients […]
Abstract: We revisit type IIB flux compactification that are mirror dual to type IIA on rigid Calabi-Yau manifolds. We find a variety of interesting new solutions, like fully stabilized Minkowski vacua and infinite families of AdS$_4$ solutions with arbitrarily large numbers of spacetime filling D3 branes. We discuss how these solutions fit into the web of […]
Open mic Swampland Discussion Topic: Cobordism
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 […]