Mariana Grana - The boundary of symmetric spaces and the swampland distance conjecture

by Dr Mariana Grana (IPhT)

Wednesday Oct 8, 2025, 4:00 PM → 5:00 PM Europe/Paris

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Abstract: The swampland distance conjecture, stating that at any boundary of moduli space there is a tower of states becoming exponentially massless, has been checked in a wide variety of setups, and is connected to other conjectures supported themselves by bottom-up arguments. However, as it stands it lacks a bottom-up explanation. Here we prove it under mild assumptions for locally symmetric moduli spaces, by characterising the spectrum and geodesics that go to the boundary using just group-theory concepts. With this, we can compute exponential rate of decay of the mass for any symmetric space and any representation of the spectrum, showing that the distance conjecture is always satisfied. Moreover, assuming only one irrep, we classify all groups and particle representations compatible with the decay rates of KK and string towers. Some of them are in the known landscape of string theory compactifications, while a handful remain to be found or proven to be in the swampland. 

Link: Zoom

AnLy: https://sites.google.com/view/anlystringsandfields