Iberian Strings Meetings 

22/01/2021, 17:30 — 18:00 —
Alessandro Mininno, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Dynamical Tadpoles and Weak Gravity Constraints

Non-supersymmetric string models are plagued with tadpoles for dynamical fields, which signal uncanceled forces sourced by the vacuum. We argue that in certain cases, uncanceled dynamical tadpoles can lead to inconsistencies with quantum gravity, via violation of swampland constraints. We describe an explicit realization in a supersymmetric toroidal $Z_2 \times Z_2 $ orientifold with $D7$-branes, where the dynamical tadpole generated by displacement of the $D7$-branes off its minimum leads to violation of the axion Weak Gravity Conjecture. In these examples, cancellation of dynamical tadpoles provides consistency conditions for the configuration, of dynamical nature (as opposed to the topological conditions of topological tadpoles, such as RR tadpole cancellation in compact spaces). We show that this approach provides a re-derivation of the Z-minimization criterion for $AdS$ vacua giving the gravitational dual of a-maximization in $4d \ N=1$ toric quiver SCFTs.

See also

Mininno-IberianStrings2021.pdf