Is M Theory Emergent?

by Antonia Paraskevopoulou (Max Planck Institute For Physics, Munich)

Friday 21 Nov 2025, 14:30 → 16:30 Europe/Rome

In this talk, I will present recent progress in the Swampland Program, which I will briefly introduce, focusing primarily on one of its less established conjectures, usually referred to as the Emergence Proposal. This postulates that the low energy effective action of a quantum gravity theory may be obtained by integrating out light towers of states appearing in various asymptotic regions of the moduli space. In doing so, I will review certain subtleties regarding the species scale, considered to be the energy scale where the effective description of gravity breaks down and will serve as the scale distinguishing perturbative from non-perturbative degrees of freedom. I will then proceed to motivate why the Emergence Proposal seems to be naturally realized in the (not yet completely understood) decompactification limit to M-theory by reviewing recent calculations of higher derivative and gauge couplings and independent arguments.