Asymptotic safety and the swampland
Date: 12 FEBRUARY 2025 from 3:00 to 4:00
Event location: Sala IR-2A
The swampland program attempts to elucidate and organize our understanding of quantum gravity from the bottom up. In light of its developments, I will present a conceptual assessment of the asymptotic safety scenario, in which high-energy gravitational physics is controlled by an ultraviolet fixed point of a bona fide quantum field theory. To this end, I will collect and connect several considerations scattered in the literature. The main upshot of the resulting arguments is a structural tension between a field-theoretic description of gravity and the statistical mechanics of black-hole microstates and holography. I will discuss how the effective formulation of asymptotically safe gravity can avoid these issues.