Towers, dualities and EFT strings in 4d N=1

by Ignacio Ruiz Garcia

Wednesday 21 May 2025, 16:30 → 18:30 Europe/Berlin

Seminar Room 2 (Building 2A)

Since their discovery and study by the end of the last millennium, string dualities have proven to be an invaluable tool in the understanding of different regions of the QG parameter space. The Swampland Distance Conjecture predicts the appearance of light towers of states when proving infinite distance limits, which in turn can be understood as new d.o.f. arising from the new perturbative description. While said dualities and towers are well understood in a local way, their global arrangement has not been thoroughly studied for lower dimensional theories with few supercharges. In 4d N=1 theories, the existence of ½-BPS EFT string solutions might impose extra constrains in the arrangement of light towers and perturbative duality frames, which I will illustrate with different top-down constructions. I will show how the tension of these EFT strings, which can be directly obtained from 4d EFT data, can determine the arrangement of light towers and duality frames in a unique way (without the need to know the precise string embedding), precisely matching those of top-down constructions, hinting towards yet another instance of string universality.