ITMP Seminar "Closed strings and weak gravity condition from higher-spin causality"

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the next ITMP seminar will be held on Wednesday, Nov 18, at 18:00. The seminar will be arranged via Zoom. 

Speaker: Sandipan Kundu, Johns Hopkins University

Title: Closed strings and weak gravity condition from higher-spin causality

Abstract: I will show that metastable higher spin particles, free or interacting, cannot couple to gravity while preserving causality unless there exist higher spin states in the gravitational sector much below the Planck scale. Causality imposes an upper bound on the mass of the lightest higher spin particle in the gravity sector in terms of quantities in the non-gravitational sector. I will argue that any weakly coupled UV completion of such a theory must have a gravity sector containing infinite towers of asymptotically parallel, equispaced, and linear Regge trajectories. This implies that the gravity sector has a stringy structure with an upper bound on the string scale. Another consequence of this bound is that all metastable higher spin particles in 4d with masses below the string scale must satisfy a weak gravity condition. Moreover, these bounds also have surprising implications for large N QCD coupled to gravity.

If you want to join the seminar please register here before 14:00, November 18.

If you would like to subscribe to newsletters about ITMP seminars, please, contact seminar@itmp.msu.ru