Perils of towers in the swamp: dark dimensions and the robustness of EFTs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A bstract Recently there has been an interesting revival of the idea to use large extra dimensions to address the dark energy problem, exploiting the (true) observation that towers of states with masses split, by $$ {M}_N^2 $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msubsup> <mml:mi>M</mml:mi> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msubsup> </mml:math> = f ( N ) m 2 , with f an unbounded function of the integer N , sometimes contribute to the vacuum energy only an amount of order m D in D dimensions. It has been argued that this fact is a consequence of swampland conjectures and may require a departure from Effective Field Theory (EFT) reasoning. We test this claim with calculations for Casimir energies in extra dimensions. We show why the domain of validity for EFTs ensures that the tower spacing scale m is always an upper bound on the UV scale for the lower-energy effective theory; use of an EFT with a cutoff part way up a tower is not a controlled approximation. We highlight the role played by the sometimes-suppressed contributions from towers in extra-dimensional approaches to the cosmological constant problem, old and new, and point out difficulties encountered in exploiting it. We compare recent swampland realizations of these arguments with earlier approaches using standard EFT examples, discussing successes and limitations of both.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".