On Towers of Light States at Infinite Distance

Abstract

Upon investigating asymptotic regimes of the F-theory moduli space, we verify that a tower of light states arises as predicted by the Distance Conjecture. Specifically, we provide a geometric classification of the infinite distance limits and comprehensively analyze the light states of the associated effective theories. We thereby find for every infinite distance limit that the effective theory either reduces to a weakly-coupled (dual) string theory or decompactifies to a higher-dimensional theory. This is in full agreement with the Emergent String Conjecture, which clarifies the physical nature of the light particle tower either as the excitation modes of an emergent weakly-coupled string or as the Kaluza-Klein modes associated with a decompactification of the spacetime. The results reported encompass both the Kähler and the complex structure limits of F-theory, respectively, in 4 and 8 dimensions, and hence are indicative of the overarching microscopic origins of the light towers.

Geometric Flow of Bubbles

“…As has been commented on in 2.4.1, only the second ones are tied to the specificities of superstrings, since they emerge from closed strings winding around the extra dimension and do not figure when compactifying traditional quantum field theories. The swampland distance conjecture has been widely explored and extended [224,[277][278][279][280][281][282][283][284], fruitfully applied in the context of cosmology [285][286][287][288] and related to either the restoration of global symmetries, which should be absent from any consistent theory of quantum gravity [262,263,[289][290][291][292][293][294][295][296], or the emergence of a critical string [297][298][299]. In a series of works [159,202,203,217,242,249,[300][301][302][303], some of which will constitute the backbone of part II, multiple generalisations of the conjecture to the space-time metric itself were put forward.…”