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### 10.11.2020 (Tuesday)

#### Closed strings and weak gravity condition from higher-spin causality

Regular Seminar Sandipan Kundu (Johns Hopkins University)

 at: 13:30 ICroom zoom 871 9223 5980 abstract: I will show that metastable higher spin particles, free or interacting, cannot couple to gravity while preserving causality unless there exist higher spin states in the gravitational sector much below the Planck scale. Causality imposes an upper bound on the mass of the lightest higher spin particle in the gravity sector in terms of quantities in the non-gravitational sector. I will argue that any weakly coupled UV completion of such a theory must have a gravity sector containing infinite towers of asymptotically parallel, equispaced, and linear Regge trajectories. This implies that the gravity sector has a stringy structure with an upper bound on the string scale. Another consequence of this bound is that all metastable higher spin particles in 4d with masses below the string scale must satisfy a weak gravity condition. Moreover, these bounds also have surprising implications for large N QCD coupled to gravity and cosmology. [please email a.held@imperial.ac.uk for zoom link or password]