Programme

O.2 -- Oral, VCTP-46

Date: Monday, 4 October 2021

Time: 11:20 - 11:40

Is the Standard Model in the Swampland? - Consistency requirements from gravitational scattering

Katsuki Aoki (1), Tran Quang Loc (2), Toshifumi Noumi (3), and Junsei Tokuda (3)

(1) Center for Gravitational Physics, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, 606-8502, Kyoto, Japan; (2) Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WA, United Kingdom; (3) Department of Physics, Kobe University, Kobe 657-8501, Japan

We study compatibility of the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity by means of gravitational positivity bounds, which provide a necessary condition for a low-energy gravitational theory to be UV completable within the weakly coupled regime of gravity. In particular, we identify the cutoff scale of the Standard Model coupled to gravity by studying consistency of light-by-light scattering. While the precise value depends on details of the Pomeron effects in QCD, the cutoff scale reads $10^{16}$ GeV if the single-Pomeron exchange picture works well up to this scale. We also demonstrate that the cutoff scale is lowered to $10^{13}$ GeV if we consider the electroweak theory without the QCD sector.

Presenter: Tran Quang Loc