Imperial College London
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Claudia de Rham

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics

Professor of Theoretical Physics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

c.de-rham CV

 
 
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Location

 

H506Huxley BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{de:2019:10.1103/PhysRevD.100.104033,
author = {de, Rham C and Heisenberg, L and Tolley, AJ},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevD.100.104033},
journal = {Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology},
pages = {1--20},
title = {Spin-2 fields and the weak gravity conjecture},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.104033},
volume = {100},
year = {2019}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Recently, it has been argued that application of the weak gravity conjecture (WGC) to spin-2 fields implies a universal upper bound on the cutoff of the effective theory for a single spin-2 field. We point out here that these arguments are largely spurious, because of the absence of states carrying spin-2 Stückelberg U(1) charge, and because of incorrect scaling assumptions. Known examples such as Kaluza-Klein theory that respect the usual WGC do so because of the existence of a genuine U(1) field under which states are charged, as in the case of the Stückelberg formulation of spin-1 theories, for which there is an unambiguously defined U(1) charge. Theories of bigravity naturally satisfy a naive formulation of the WGC, MW<MPl, since the force of the massless graviton is always weaker than the massive spin-2 modes. It also follows that theories of massive gravity trivially satisfies this form of the WGC. We also point out that the identification of a massive spin-2 state in a truncated higher derivative theory, such as Einstein-Weyl-squared or its supergravity extension, bears no relationship with massive spin-2 states in the UV completion, contrary to previous statements in the literature. We also discuss the conjecture from a swampland perspective and show how the emergence of a universal upper bound on the cutoff relies on strong assumptions on the scale of the couplings between the spin-2 and other fields, an assumption which is known to be violated in explicit examples.
AU  - de,Rham C
AU  - Heisenberg,L
AU  - Tolley,AJ
DO  - 10.1103/PhysRevD.100.104033
EP  - 20
PY  - 2019///
SN  - 1550-2368
SP  - 1
TI  - Spin-2 fields and the weak gravity conjecture
T2  - Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.104033
UR  - http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000496926600007&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
UR  - https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.104033
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/77448
VL  - 100
ER  -
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