Marco Scalisi

Quantum gravity constraints on scalar potentials

In this talk, I will discuss some of the quantum gravity constraints that the Swampland program imposes on the scalar potentials of low-energy effective field theories. I will primarily focus on the Swampland Distance Conjecture, which implies that infinite scalar field variations necessarily correspond to the massless limit of, at least, one infinite tower of states. By requiring that such behaviour holds equally also in presence of a scalar potential, I will derive an upper bound on its gradient in terms of the deviation angle from geodesics in moduli space and decay rate of the tower. This has direct implications for the realization and consistency of multi-field scenarios in string theory. The investigation focus is mainly on hyperbolic geometries, as prototype of string compactification spaces . In the framework of N = 1 supergravity, I will show that the constraints are even more stringent thus setting a bound on the Kähler curvature.