Event

A common feature of theories of quantum gravity is the presence of light, massive states beyond those described by effective field theory. The species scale gives a measure for the number of such light states and serves as UV cutoff in the gravitational sector of the theory. In the first part of this talk I will discuss the dependence of the species scale on the moduli of the theory and show how, for a large class of examples, it can reliably be computed at any point in moduli space thereby providing new insights into the bulk region of moduli spaces of gravitational theories. Studying the variation of the species scale over the field space I will further argue for a sharp bound on the slope of the species scale. The second part of my talk focuses on asymptotic weak-coupling regions where string theoretic arguments suggest that only certain towers of light states can emerge. By analyzing the universal properties of the density of states in gravitational weak-coupling limits I will provide string-theory-independent evidence for this prediction.