https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-5811-3
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
The Weak Gravity Conjecture and emergence from an ultraviolet cutoff
1
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, ON, N2L 2Y5, Canada
2
Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
3
School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA
* e-mail: rudelius@ias.edu
Received:
12
March
2018
Accepted:
16
April
2018
Published online:
26
April
2018
We study ultraviolet cutoffs associated with the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) and Sublattice Weak Gravity Conjecture (sLWGC). There is a magnetic WGC cutoff at the energy scale 
with an associated sLWGC tower of charged particles. A more fundamental cutoff is the scale at which gravity becomes strong and field theory breaks down entirely. By clarifying the nature of the sLWGC for nonabelian gauge groups we derive a parametric upper bound on this strong gravity scale for arbitrary gauge theories. Intriguingly, we show that in theories approximately saturating the sLWGC, the scales at which loop corrections from the tower of charged particles to the gauge boson and graviton propagators become important are parametrically identical. This suggests a picture in which gauge fields emerge from the quantum gravity scale by integrating out a tower of charged matter fields. We derive a converse statement: if a gauge theory becomes strongly coupled at or below the quantum gravity scale, the WGC follows. We sketch some phenomenological consequences of the UV cutoffs we derive.
© The Author(s), 2018
