September 23, 2025: Swampland Open Mic
October 7, 2025: Veronica Collazuol (IFT Madrid) and Mariana Graña (IPhT Saclay): "The Boundary of Symmetric Moduli Spaces and the Distance Conjecture"
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 the 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.
October 21, 2025: Gary Shiu (UW Madison) and Flavio Tonioni (U. Padua)
November 4, 2025: Seung-Joo Lee (IBS-CTPU)
November 18, 2025: Muthusamy Rajaguru (IFT Madrid) and George Tringas (Lehigh U.)
May 13, 2025: Alvaro Herraez (MPI Munich): "On the Double EFT Expansion in Quantum Gravity"
April 29, 2025: Alberto Castellano (UChicago) and Matteo Zatti (MPI Munich): "Quantum Calabi-Yau Black Holes and Non-perturbative D0-brane Effects"
April 15, 2025: Ivano Basile (MPP) and Alessia Platania (Bohr Inst.): "Swampland & Asymptotic Safety "
April 1, 2025: Sebastian Rauch (UMass Amherst) and Tom Rudelius (Durham): "Fractionally Confined Monopoles in Failures of the Lattice Weak Gravity Conjecture"
March 18, 2025: Damian van de Heisteeg (Harvard): "Finiteness and the Emergence of Dualities"
March 4, 2025: Matt Reece (Harvard): "Instanton Number in QFT and Quantum Gravity"
February 18, 2025: Hee-Cheol Kim (POSTECH): "Finite Landscape of 6d (1,0) Supergravity "
February 4, 2025: Timm Wrase (Lehigh U.): "Stabilizing all moduli in a Landau-Ginzburg model"
January 21, 2025: Justin Kaidi (Kyushu U.): "Non-Supersymmetric Heterotic Branes"
December 3, 2024: José Calderón-Infante (CERN): "Higher-spin Symmetry and Tensionless Strings in AdS/CFT"
November 19, 2024: Hirosi Ooguri (Caltech and U. Tokyo): "AdS Distance Conjecture"
November 5, 2024: Manki Kim (Stanford): "String perturbation theory of Klebanov-Strassler throat"
October 22, 2024: Open Mic Discussion on "Non-Supersymmetric Strings"
October 8, 2024: Simon Caron-Huot (McGill) and Yue-Zhou Li (Princeton): "Gravity and a universal cutoff for field theory "
September 24, 2024: Cumrun Vafa (Harvard): "Dark Dimension and the Grand Unification of Forces"
May 7, 2024: Alek Bedroya (Princeton): "Spectrum of states in quantum gravity: A tale of UV/IR connections"
April 23, 2024: Eric Perlmutter (IPhT Saclay): "A Rigorous Holographic Bound on AdS Scale Separation"
April 9, 2024: Open Mic Discussion on "Species Scale and QG cutoff"
March 26, 2024: Matteo Lotito (Seoul U.): "Proving the WGC in perturbative string theory"
March 12, 2024: Eduardo García-Valdecasas (SISSA): "Spontaneously broken (-1)-form U(1) symmetries"
February 27, 2024: Max Hübner (UPenn): "On the Holographic Dual of a Topological Symmetry Operator"
February 13, 2024: Dieter Lüst (MPI and LMU): "Species, thermodynamics and emergent strings"
January 30, 2024: Angel Uranga (IFT Madrid): "Dynamical cobordisms everywhere all at once"
December 4, 2023: Ivano Basile (LMU): "Anomalies in string universality"
November 13, 2023: Ralph Blumenhagen and Niccolo Cribiori (MPI): "Is M-theory emergent?"
October 30, 2023: Masahito Yamazaki (IPMU): "Emergent Global Symmetries in Holography for Swamplanders"
October 16, 2023: Open Mic Discussion on "Asymptotic Accelerated Expansion"
October 2, 2023: Dimitrios Tsimpis (Lyon) "Accelerated expansion in an open universe"
Aaron Hillman (Princeton) "Stringy Completions of the Standard Model from the Bottom Up"
Jonathan Heckman (UPenn) and Arun Debray (Purdue). Title: "IIBordia"
Naomi Gendler and Jakob Moritz (Cornell U) "Moduli Space Reconstruction and Weak Gravity"
Juan Maldacena (IAS) "Wormholes and global symmetry violations in high energy amplitudes"
Savdeep Sethi (U Chicago) "Stringy solutions without supersymmetry"
Alek Bedroya (Harvard) "Holography, TCC and the Distance conjecture"
Luca Martucci (U Padova) "Quantum Gravity bounds on 4d N=1 EFTs in four dimensions"
Stefano Andriolo (Ben Gurion U) "Self-binding in AdS and the WGC"
Hector Parra and Bernardo Fraiman (IPhT Saclay) "Unifying the 6d N=(1,1) string landscape"
Ralph Blumenhagen and Niccolo Cribiori "Cobordism, K-theory and Tadpoles"
Ben Heidenreich (UMass Amherst) "Sharpening the Swampland Distance conjecture"
Shai Chester (Harvard) "Pure supergravity and the conformal boostrap"
Georges Obied (Harvard) "Inflation and light Dark matter constraints from Swampland"
Simon Caron-Huot (McGill) and Julio Parra (Caltech) "Causality constraints on corrections to Einstein gravity"
Timm Wrase and Eduardo Gonzalo (Lehigh) "Type IIB flux compactifications with h11=0"
Jose Calderon-Infante (IFT Madrid) "Open mic discussion on Corbordism"
Fernando Quevedo (Cambridge) "RG-induced moduli stabilization and brane-antibrane inflation"
Tom Rudelius (UC Berkeley) "Generalized Global Symmetries and the Weak Gravity Conjecture"
Patrick Draper (Illinois) and Alvaro Herraez (IPhT Saclay) "Open Mic discussion on entropy bounds"
Fernando Marchesano (IFT Madrid) and Max Wiesner (Harvard CMSA) "4d strings at strong coupling"
Du Pei (Harvard CMSA) "Holomorphic CFTs and topological modular forms"
Timo Weigand and Rafael Alavarez-Garcia (DESY) "Membrane limits in Quantum Gravity"
Lars Aalsma (UW-Madison) "Extremal black hole corrections from Iyer-Wald"
Thomas Grimm (Utrecht U) "Taming the Landscape"
Timm Wrase (Lehigh U) "Scale separated AdS vacua?"
Pieter Bomans (Padova and Princeton) "Bubble instability of massive IIA on AdS4xS6"
Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS) and Gary Shiu (UW-Md) "Open mic discussion on Swampland, unitarity and causality"
Thomas Van Riet (KU Leuven) "The FL bound"
Eran Palti (Ben Gurion U) "Convexity of Charged Operators in CFTs and the Weak Gravity conjecture"
Manki Kim (MIT) "Small cosmological constants in string theory"
John Stout (Harvard) "Decoding divergent distances"
Alessandro Tomasiello (Bioca) and Bruno de Luca (Stanford) "Bounds on KK Spin 2 fields"
Yuta Hamada (Harvard) "8d supergravity, reconstruction of internal geometry and the Swampland"
Daniel Klaewer (JGU Mainz) "The Refined Distance Conjecture in the N=2 Duality Web"
Joao Penedones (EPFL) "Where is String Theory?"
Mariana Graña (CEA-Saclay) "The landscape of toroidal string compactifications"
Leonardo Rastelli (SUNNY Stony Brook) "Sharp boundaries for the Swampland"
Dieter Lüst (MPI and LMU) "The Swampland at a large number of dimensions"
Markus Dierigl (LMU and UPenn) "Center 1-form symmetries and the Swampland"
Ralph Blumenhagen (LMU) "De Sitter Quantum Breaking, Swampland conjectures and Thermal strings"
Daniel Harlow (MIT) "Global symmetry, Euclidean gravity and the black hole information problem"
Severin Lüst (Harvard) "The Tadpole Problem"
Jake McNamara and Tom Rudelius "The Completeness Hypothesis and Chern-Weil Symmetries"
Daniel Jughans (Harvard CMSA) "Control issues of KKLT"
Carlo Angelantonj and Emelian Dudas "String defects, Supersymmetry and the Swampland"
Sergio Cecotti "Comments and speculations on swampland geometry"
Hirosi Ooguri "Testing Swampland conjectures"
John March-Russell "The Standard Model and the Swampland"
Angel Uranga "A discrete life in the Swampland"
Eran Palti "Brane-Monodromy Duality at Infinite Distance"
March 8-10 2021: "Zooming in on the Swampland" workshop: