Physics (Internal)

Strengthening the Weak Gravity Conjecture

This event is part of the HET Seminar Series.

The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) posits that subextremal charged black holes can decay to charged particles, implying a mild constraint on the spectrum of a quantum gravity theory that has interesting phenomenological consequences. I examine the consistency of the WGC under toroidal compactification, showing that the WGC can be violated in the dimensionally reduced theory even when it holds in the higher dimensional theory. I propose a strengthening of the conjecture inspired by Kaluza-Klein theory which is consistent under compactification, and show that this strong form is satisfied in many explicit string theory examples. I comment on possible connections to the spectrum of charged operators in a CFT, both in two dimensions and in higher dimensions.