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.
During the 2021-22 academic year, the CMSA will be co-hosting a seminar on Swampland, with the Harvard Physics Department, organized by Miguel Montero, Cumrun Vafa, Irene Valenzuela. This seminar is a part of the Swampland Program. This seminar will take place on Mondays at 10:00 am – 11:30 am (Boston time). To learn how to attend, please subscribe here. Talks will […]
Speaker: John Stout, Harvard University Title: Decoding Divergent Distances Abstract: Motivated by a relationship between the Zamolodchikov and NLSM metrics to the so-called quantum information metric, I will discuss recent work (2106.11313) on understanding infinite distance limits within the context of information theory. I will describe how infinite distance points represent theories that are hyper-distinguishable, in […]
Abstract: We construct supersymmetric AdS4 vacua of type IIB string theory in compactifications on orientifolds of Calabi-Yau threefold hypersurfaces. We first find explicit orientifolds and quantized fluxes for which the superpotential takes the form proposed by Kachru, Kallosh, Linde, and Trivedi. Given very mild assumptions on the numerical values of the Pfaffians, these compactifications admit […]
Abstract: In this talk I will introduce a particular formulation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in AdS space in terms of the self-binding energy of a particle. The holographic CFT dual of this formulation corresponds to a certain convex-like structure for operators charged under continuous global symmetries. Motivated by this, we propose a conjecture that this […]
Abstract: I will explain what the Festina Lente bound means and where it comes from. Then I discuss its possible implications for phenomenology, both top-down and bottom-up.
Abstract: I describe our work looking at `traditional’ scenarios of moduli stabilisation from a holographic perspective. This reveals some interesting structure that is not apparent from the top-down perspective. For vacua in the extreme regions of moduli space, such as LVS in type IIB or the DGKT flux vacua in type IIA, the dual moduli […]
Speaker: Pieter Bomans, Princeton Title: Bubble instability of mIIA on AdS_4 x S^6 Abstract: Recently, a set of non-supersymmetric AdS_4 vacua of massive type IIA string theory has been constructed. These vacua are perturbatively stable with respect to the full KK spectrum of type mIIA supergravity and furthermore, they are stable against a variety of […]
This week’s seminar will be an open mic discussion which will be led by Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS), and by Gary Shiu (UW-Madison), and the topic will be “Swampland constraints, Unitarity and Causality”. They will start with a brief introduction sharing their thoughts about the topic and moderate a discussion afterwards.
Abstract: In this talk I will introduce a generalized notion of finiteness that provides a structural principle for the set of effective theories that can be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. More concretely, I will propose a ‘tameness conjecture’ that states that all scalar field spaces and coupling functions that appear in such an effective theory must be definable in an o-minimal structure. The fascinating field […]